Prisoner
by antepathy
Summary: Starscream, captured by Autobots, spends time with a linguist. This is my very first fanfic, so it's a little...wobbly. Now divided into slightly more manageable chapters!
1. Chapter 1

**Day One**

**Diego Garcia, 0214H**

**Hangar F3**

The hangar bay door groaned in protest. For possibly the first time since its installation, the door was being opened, and it didn't seem too happy about it. Jennifer Silver, graduate student in comparative linguistics, who had been, grudgingly, given a back corner of Hangar F3 for her research, muffled a curse as she rolled out of her cot.

The night gaped beyond the open door. A squad of NEST soldiers trooped in, just like they owned the place, Jennifer thought sourly. And in a way, which didn't improve her mood much, they did. "What the hell are you doing here?" she asked, trying to bundle her wavy hair into a ponytail. She winced as one of the soldiers hit the lights. Thirty feet overhead, fluorescents bloomed.

"You oughta be happy," the squad's leader said, "It's like Christmas morning for you." He gestured into the blackness beyond. "Got you your own subject."

"My own…? Is that a Decepticon?" Still blinking at the sudden wash of light, she could dimly make out a massive, blocky shape on one of the shift-pallets the NEST soldiers used to load and unload heavy equipment.

Another soldier laughed. "What's left of him, at any rate."

"And you're bringing him _here_?" She knew the soldiers didn't think much of her or her research, but this was really a bit much. Around her, more soldiers poured in, restacking boxes, clearing a space in the center of the hangar big enough, she presumed, to accommodate the robot.

The sergeant shrugged. "Orders from on high. Maybe they figure you'd leave the rest of our guys alone."

It was too late at night to go over this old ground again. Her university had ponied up bunches of money and resources when the DoD had requested engineers, robotics experts and the like. Part of their deal had been, well, her. While her engineering friends happily studied specs and schematics gleaned even from the simplest of robotic designs the Autobots decided were safe to share with the humans, she'd made the case that study of their language was essential. The DoD, which had thrived for years through proactive paranoia, had approved with enthusiasm—maybe they didn't trust their Autobot 'allies' as much as they said they did. But the NEST team didn't seem to share the DoD's enthusiasm.

Jennifer pinched her mouth at the sergeant. "I don't mean to question orders, of course," she had no patience for all this military hierarchy nonsense, "but a Decepticon? Isn't it going to try to kill me or something?"

The sergeant was unimpressed. "Just use your magic language hoodoo on him," he said. Behind him, a few others laughed. "Or your charm," added another. "You must be saving it up somewhere."

Jennifer felt her hands ball into fists. Classic anger response, she told herself. Don't let yourself get riled. You're not going to punch him. Especially because he's in full body armor. She forced a smile onto her face, and said, "Well, let's just see what I have to work with, then."

The robot was in awful shape. In her unprofessional opinion, that is. Most of its right leg was missing, the left bore some blackening and pitting from a large explosion. The appendages of the right hand had been crumpled together into a half-crushed, half-welded flipper, and barrels on a large chain gun on that arm were half melted. The chassis was pocked with the circular hits from the NEST soldiers' guns, and the left side of the jaw hung slackly, several metal plates hanging loosely, leaking some whitish watery fluid. Engineers had already been at the 'bot—she could see their handiwork in the hose clamps and the blobs of insulating foam capping off the ends of the robot's injuries.

The robot showed no sign of recognition of anything. Its eyes irised inward a little, probably an involuntary response to the bright light, but it showed no curiosity, didn't look around. Jennifer wondered about the jaw injury—had it damaged the creature further up into the processor? A brain-dead subject would be useless to her.

One of the soldiers slapped her deliberately too hard on the shoulder. "Don't worry, he'll make it through the night," he said.

"What the hell did you do to him?" She'd seen the Autobots come back injured, but never anything like this.

The soldier stepped away from her as if her stupidity were contagious. "Umm, it's a _war_? They try to kill us, we try to kill them?"

"Yeah, but…."

"Awww, getting all soft on the bad guys," another soldier said. "You know how it is with those soft college types. Sympathy for the devil and all that."

"That's an Ozzy album, not philosophy," she shot back. And immediately regretted. Nothing worse than playing into their 'intellectual snob' stereotype. "Anyway," she said, walking up to the creature's face, careful to step around a puddle of the white…whatever it was drooling, "Can it even talk?" She reached a hand up toward the robot's face, trying to get, if nothing else, an ocular response.

The red eyes suddenly snapped into focus, first on her outstretched hand, then back to her face. The jaw worked, the dangling plates clattering. She heard a sound like gears grinding from deep in the thing's throat. It gave a sudden heave and splattered her with a thick yellow goo.

Jennifer could hear the soldiers laughing, even through the thick stuff. She tried to wipe it off her face. It stung into her eyes. Not as much as the soldiers laughing stung her pride. This little story would make it through Diego Garcia before breakfast. She could hardly imagine the nicknames they'd come up with for her. She cast about in her brain for something to say that would seem dignified, that would negate the whole absurdity. Nothing. How many years of education and you can't even come up with a face-saving comment?

Her shoulders slumped. "I'll just get the hose, then, shall I?" she said, mostly to herself.

The sergeant stepped back as she crossed his path, dripping yellow gunk. "Looks like the start of a beautiful friendship," he grinned.

**0308H**

She'd hosed herself off, top to bottom, and spent some time squinting at her skin, trying to see if the yellow goo had been some sort of corrosive. It left a rusted-iron kind of smell, but seemed otherwise to have no lasting effect. The next reasonable thing to do was to clean the robot up a bit. After all, she was going to be left in a 6-foot reinforced concrete walled hangar with the thing for days on end. Better to try and find some way to make the thing not want to kill her. Him, she corrected herself. Not thing. Stop calling him a thing.

Step one, she said, don't even respond to the previous incident. Maybe he'd been unable to control himself. Maybe it wasn't deliberate. Don't judge. She forced her brightest smile. Autobots recognized human facial expressions, even though they couldn't mimic many of them. She didn't know about the Decepticons. There was so much nobody knew about their enemy. She felt a kind of excitement. If she could just get the thing—him—to talk, how much could she learn! Not only about the robots in general, but about the real cause of the fighting between the two factions. Or were they races? See, she didn't even know that much!

"Hi!" she said, brightly. She gestured to the floor next to her. "I've got some stuff here for you. This," she held it up, "is a hose. I'd like to at least rinse some of that gunk off you." She spoke slowly, carefully, the way one spoke to a small child. "And this," she gestured to the hip-high barrel the soldiers had left her with, "is…well, it's some sort of analgesic, they tell me. Fancy word for painkiller. If I put it on parts that hurt, they won't hurt as much. Okay?" She paused. She was definitely getting an ocular response—the eyes had tracked to each item as she'd indicated it. But it didn't say or do anything, not even twitch. Okay, ask direct permission. "Is it okay if I do these?" Maybe he didn't understand the word 'okay'. How to say it more simply? "I'm trying to help. May I help?" Then, more bluntly, "Please don't try to kill me." It blinked, once, slowly, as if tired.

She sucked in a deep breath and scooped up the hose. She approached his head slowly, acutely aware she was well within the reach of his wicked looking barbed hands. She began a nervous babble. "That yellow stuff didn't taste very good to me, and probably not to you, either, I'm guessing, So I'm just going to use this," she hefted the hose again, "to wash it away." She opened the nozzle and hesitantly, keeping one nervous eye on the robot's good hand, began spraying the parts of the face, neck and upper chest that she could see had the yellow goo on them. The goo had dried around the edges to a thick crust, like a fried egg. "There, that's not so bad, is it? That's better, right?" She sluiced water around the robot's mouth, half afraid he might sputter. No, she told herself, they don't breathe. You can't drown one of them, especially not with a modified garden hose. If they were that easy to kill, Diego Garcia would be collecting cobwebs. When the water finally ran clear, she shut off the hose and scooped up a double-handful of the analgesic gel. The robot's large red eyes focussed on her hands as she raised them. "This is the pain killing stuff I told you about. I'd like to put some of it on your jaw."

The red eyes tracked her as she approached, as if measuring the threat she represented. She held up one gelled hand. "I'm going to put this on you. It's not going to hurt." She reached slowly toward one of the twisted plates. Her engineer friends told her that the robots, at least the Autobots, weren't made of dead metal plates—that the metal somehow had something like nerves in it that transmitted messages to the central processor. In other words, that they felt pain.

She slathered the plate with the gel. She heard a mechanical sound, like a servo preparing to fire, but the robot didn't move. "Again?" she said, gesturing toward the face. The huge eyes followed her. This time she went for a plate a little deeper under the surface, and the complicated system of gears and wires that were connected to it. When she finished, she stepped back again. "Is that helping?"

The robot blinked at her again.

"More?" She gestured back to the tub of gel.

The robot moved with a loud groan of metal and the sound of sliding servos. Jennifer jumped back, nearly tripping over part of the hose. She landed heavily on her hands and backside. And now it kills me, she thought. And my last action will have been falling on my ass. Great.

But when she looked up, the robot was trying to reach its injured arm toward her. When she jumped back, it had frozen, midmove and was watching her, almost curiously.

"Oh," she said. She pushed to her feet, hands slipping a little in the bits of gel. "I see." She laughed, nervously. "I get it. Yes. Of course." She scooped another amount of gel onto her hands. "I'll just come around, okay?" She was careful to walk where the robot could see her for as long as possible. He lowered his injured arm down to the ground next to the shift pallet.

Up close, the damage looked even worse—the long hooked spikes on the robot's hands had been bent, as if hammered flat. One had been pushed down and was puncturing the finger next to it. One side digit—did this robot have two thumbs per hand?—had been twisted around and melted back against the wrist. She plopped the mound of gel she'd scooped up on the back of the hand and got to work spreading it around, trying to work it as best she could into the spaces between the plates. The robot, who had lifted his head to watch her, lowered his head back down to the pallet. Jennifer took this as a positive sign.

When she'd finished and walked around to the robot's head again, the eyes had flickered closed, large metal shutters covering the red sockets. They snapped open, as if he'd been caught napping. Suddenly Jennifer felt achingly tired too. She managed another smile, a little less textbook this time. "They said they'll come in to help suspend you in the morning. That's supposed to help. Right now, though, I need some sleep, and I think you do too. If you even sleep. Okay?" The robot blinked at her again, inscrutable. Well, the blink had meant 'okay' in thus far—or at least it hadn't been a warning or a no-signal. Jennifer washed her hands in the industrial sink and hit the lights.

**0852H**

"Well, well. Look who made it through the night."

"They told me they were sure he would," Jennifer said.

"I was talking about you, Barfy. From what I heard he was seasoning you up or something."

"Shut up. And do your job."

"Fine, fine." The engineer turned his attention to where his team was rigging a suspension harness from the ceiling braces. "You just too nasty to eat," he added under his breath.

Jennifer decided to let that one pass. She was too tired. It wasn't as easy as one would think to sleep in the same room as a hostile and injured alien robot. It hadn't help that he made weird noises half the night too. Not any words she recognized, though her Cybertronian lexicon was still pitifully small.

Instead she watched the engineers measure the robot, and retire to do some quick calculations of where to place the hanging straps. The Decepticon's chassis was broader than the Autobots, and, apparently, his suspension points had to be adjusted. Still, the engineers worked with ruthless efficiency, and before the morning was half over, they'd managed to hoist the robot into something like a sitting position. Jennifer was somewhat relieved to see that the robot looked around him as they lifted him. He seemed a little more…with it today than yesterday. Maybe today she could get him to talk.

She waited until the engineers had cleared out, simply because she didn't want to fail in front of witnesses. She gathered up her oversized notepad and black marker and stopped at what she hoped was a respectful distance.

"Remember me? From last night?"

The robot turned his head away. This was not going well.

"Yeah, well, I don't want to remember last night either, to be honest."

He kept his head fixed at a pile of crates on the far side of the hangar.

"Don't even pretend you don't understand what I'm saying," she said. "I know you do." Still no response. "Okay, I'm going to talk, and you're going to pretend not to listen. That's how it's going to be, right? Fine." She straightened up. "I'm a researcher in comparative linguistics. I'm not associated with the soldiers who brought you here or anything. I'm just interested in languages. In particular, I'm interested in your language." Though he kept his head turned away, Jennifer saw his eyes flicker down to her. Encouraging sign. She hoped. She ran with it.

"Every language has a mechanism for making new words, and for stringing those words together into sentences. There's a theory called Universal Grammar that says that these mechanisms are innate—that every creature who can access language not only has a grammar, but that all the grammars play off basically the same rules—all of them have nouns, and adverbs and conditional tenses and stuff like that." This was all Linguistics 101 stuff, but the robot was definitely listening.

"You, I mean, all of you from Cybertron, well, your our first chance to really test that. Is Universal Grammar universal? That's what I'm interested in. How you make language. I'm not interested in all this war stuff. Just language." He was still listening. She opened her palms. "Will you help me?"

He turned his head toward her, looking down at her over the buckle of the suspension harness. "Go slag yourself," he said in Cybertronian.

Jennifer cocked her head for a moment. She'd trained her ears enough to pick out the sounds. And she'd definitely heard this phrase before. Delightful Ironhide.

She picked up her pad and pen and scribbled a response. Human throats wouldn't ever be able to make the sounds of the language, but she'd made some good headway on the written form. "After you," she wrote, and flashed it at the robot.

A quick blink this time. Surprise. Ha! She thought. You didn't expect that, did you?

"Why don't you get your Autobot friends to help you." Still in Cybertronian.

She poised her pen over her paper. Lowered it. "Can I answer in English? I don't have enough of your words."

The robot lowered his chin. Listening, but his eyes narrowed.

"It's not really a big secret. They don't like me very much. They resent that I'm here at all—obviously. I mean, you can see the luxury accommodations they've given me. They think my whole project is stupid. And, of course, I dared question their great leader."

The robot cocked his head. Jennifer had always been pretty good at reading body language, but sooner or later she'd have to make him do more talking. Still, right now she needed him to agree.

"Well, I kind of told him that he had no right to pull some moral superiority thing. He pulls it all the time with us here, like he knows what's best for everyone. And he gives all of these speeches—they're really boring—about rights and duties and living in peace, and what's the next thing he does? Turn around and rip the guts out of a Decepticon. It just seemed kind of hypocritical. That whole 'peaceful warrior' line. I mean, I get war is war, but it seems that all this talk about living in harmony is just garbage—like his idea of 'harmony' means that all the bad guys are dead." She shrugged. "Seems a bit fascist to me, that's all. Peace built on the bones of one's enemies and all that. It's repressive. But he acts like it's morally pure, and it's not. I just wanted him to acknowledge that."

"He did not." In English. Jennifer looked up, startled.

"No, of course not." He was finally speaking, like an actual conversation. A surge of hope.

"That is why, I think, he did not kill me." The robot spoke slowly, as if having to choose his words carefully.

"What do you mean?"

He lifted his injured arm. "I was injured. I was out of ammunition. I was helpless. He came at me. If he killed me, I told him, he would be no better than a Decepticon." He dropped into Cybertronian, adding, softly, "Than me."

Jennifer struggled for something to say. Should she show sympathy?

"I will help you with your research," he said, abruptly.

1510H

By midafternoon, she was jubilant over her progress. She'd set up her kiddie pool filled with sand where the robot could trace the strokes of the written form of a word for her and they'd gone over three of her lists of vocabulary words. This was more progress than she'd made in the last month, trying to catch the Autobots in slivers of their downtime. She'd have to get another of her oversized sketchpads soon. And find some time to actually memorize her new vocabulary.

And they were just getting to the harder words now, and her brain was tired. Her first lists had been words that she'd figured would be universal across sentient species, like body parts and basic descriptors of the physical world—colors, shapes, numbers. Up next were the words based on concepts she wasn't sure robots even had, like 'friend' and 'child' and 'eat.'

She stretched her arms up over her head. "Well," she said, "I need a break. You too, probably."

"You have learned?"

She flipped back over her notes. "Well, one thing that's odd: you use different words for colors if the thing your describing is inanimate."  
"Is that interesting?"

"Well, it's part of the puzzle. At this point, I need all the pieces I can get."

The robot slumped back in the harness, almost as if relieved. "That is good."

That was a heck of a turnaround from this morning. "You want it to go well?"

The facial plates shifted into an expression she couldn't read. "As long as you are learning, they have a reason not to terminate me."

"I'm not sure I'd count a lot on that."

"It is," he said, "something."

The side door clanged open again. The engineers again? Jennifer clutched her sketchpad. The robot turned his head, but his view of the door was blocked by his suspended shoulder. NEST soldiers boiled in again. What were they doing here? Strange how they'd leave her alone for weeks at a time, and now they were making Hangar F3 into quite the hotspot.

"Just checking up?" Try to take control of the situation—these military types hated it. Her fake smile crumbled as a yellow vehicle rolled in behind the soldiers. Her robot's good hand clenched.

"Your new friend needs some adjustments to make him safe," the team leader said.

"Adjustments?" She took an involuntary step closer to her robot. His eyes had stayed locked on the yellow Autobot as it rolled to a stop and transformed. Of all the Autobots, Ratchet was the least hostile to her. Possibly because he was interested in studying humans the same way she was interested in studying his kind. Her robot did not seem to have the same reaction. He gathered his injured limbs to him warily.

"Our kind," Ratchet explained, "regenerates certain weapons, the same way you grow your hair or your fingernails. I think you understand that we would all feel more comfortable if we made sure he didn't have the ability to shoot any of us. Including you." Behind him, two NEST soldiers dragged in a pallet laden with odd shaped pieces of metal, like a suit of armor someone had broken into pieces.

"I suppose," she said. "But what's all that?"

"Other items to make him safe." That was unpleasantly vague. She stepped in between the two robots.

"He doesn't need them."

"Really?" The NEST team leader tapped a wrench against the pallet. "What, did he _promise_ to behave?"

"He won't—"

Ratchet cut her off with a shake of his head. "You do not know them, Miss Silver. Now, step aside. Please."

"Not until you tell me what you're doing. Exactly."

"I told you. We will neutralize his armaments."

"Like milking a snake," the NEST soldier added.

"And?"  
Ratchet shrugged in a very human gesture. Ironhide would doubtless tell him he'd been around humans too long. "These," he gestured, "are blocks. They're to prevent him from transforming. This over here is a governor to keep him from setting off those jets of his."

"This can't be legal," Jennifer argued. A NEST soldier planted his hands firmly on her shoulders, hustling her out of the way. "Hey!"

"Stand aside, ma'am," the soldier said in some thick accent. Tennessee, her training told her. Not that she cared at the moment.

"Get your hands off me." She tried to twist out of his grip. "You can't do this," she cried out. "It's not right. It's not humane."

"He's not human, ma'am," the soldier said, clamping both of her hands in one of his gloved hands. "Let them do their work."

"They'll hurt him…"

The soldier grabbed at her shoulder with his free hand. "Listen here, ma'am. What you think his side would do with one of ours?"

Her mouth gaped open. She didn't have an answer for that.

"Come on," the soldier dragged her to the interior door. "Maybe better y'all don't have to watch."

**1645H**

"Look," she said for about the fifth time. "I'm _sorry_!"

He looked, she admitted, miserable. Plates of metal had been inserted over and through some of his joints. The governors perched on his jets like sullen parrots. He hadn't spoken a word since she'd returned. She'd tried her best—gone straight up to the Colonel himself and gave him what she'd hoped was a diplomatic, but impassioned, piece of her mind. It hadn't done any good. Didn't even make her feel the least bit better. Just one more thing she'd failed at.

"I have no control over what they do," she said, lamely.

It might have been her imagination, but she could have sworn the robot shot her a sarcastic glare.

"If I'd known what they were going to do—"

"Yes?"

She dropped her hands to her sides. "Nothing, I guess. Look, I don't know what I can do to apologize…."

"This 'apology' is a word we do not have." At least he was speaking again. She didn't mind if he was mad at her—she was pretty mad at herself. She just needed him to talk. And better yet, he was talking about language.

"Apology. You tell someone how bad you feel that something happened."

"And what use is it to inform the other of your feelings?"

"Not much, I guess. But at least the other person knows you feel something about it. That's better than nothing."

"Is it?"

She laughed. "Not really." First she'd lost an argument with the CO, now she was losing a philosophical debate with an alien robot. Her day was just getting better and better. "Okay, then, what do you do?"

"What do I do? I should think that would be obvious." He raised his good arm, flexing the barbs on his hands. He looked like he wanted to, like he could do something more with it, but the metal plates Ratchet had installed prevented it.

"I mean when you do something wrong. When you screw up or things don't turn out the way you expect. Surely you say something?"

The robot considered for a moment. "Normally, I stay quiet and hope someone else gets the blame."

"And if they don't?"  
"Failure deserves punishment."

"Really?" Her turn to be sarcastic.

"Of course." The robot looked at her as if she were stupid. Which he probably thought she was. "Look," he said, and quickly traced a character into the kiddie pool of sand. "The word itself—you see the root for 'penalty' right here."

She copied the word down quickly. "That's a stupid way to run things."

"It is how we run things."

"But doesn't it make you afraid to try anything, because you might fail?"

"That is the point. It motivates us. What we do, we must not fail to do." That sounded as idiotic as some of the NEST commander's speeches.

"And how's that worked out for you?"

"It works fine," he said, hotly.

"So…you're okay with getting beaten up because maybe something entirely beyond your control prevented things from working out the way they were supposed to?"

"It is how we run things," he repeated, smugly.

Jennifer had an uncomfortable thought. Maybe Ratchet was right. She didn't know their kind. And she certainly didn't know him. Just because he'd spent a few hours tracing out nursery-level words for her didn't make him an angel. He even said so himself—he was presuming his usefulness would keep him alive. "And so when someone under you screws up, you have no problem beating them up."

"It is," he said, though sounding a little less sure of himself this time, "how things are."

"So," she said, hesitantly, not really sure what she was doing, and trying hard not to think about it. "So. I let you down. Are you going to punish me?"

"No." He looked a little shocked at the suggestion.

"Why not?"

He sagged back against the harness for a moment, thinking. Rationalizing. "First, in the long term, it would do me very little good to harm you at the moment. If I damaged you, they would likely terminate me."

"Oh, that's encouraging."

"Second, you are too puny for me to waste my time with."

"Except, of course, wasting your time with me right now."

He paused to glare at her and then continued, sounding a bit more sure of himself, "Third, you are not in a position to safeguard me—not that I would tolerate protection from one of your kind." It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that hiding behind her project was exactly that. She thought better of it.

"I imagine not. So, how often do you get punished?"

"I do not often fail," he said. "And there are not many above me."

"So you're pretty high up, then?" He nodded. "I thought you guys believed in all of that 'never surrender' stuff?"

He made a grating sound that might have been a laugh. "Surrender is a tactical option. For some."

"Not everyone?"  
"I can serve my purpose better alive than dead," he said. "Others may not be as vital to the cause."

"But you're important?" She wasn't convinced: if he was so important, why did they chuck him back in F3 with her?

"Yes. Do you not know who I am?" He looked a little hurt.

She snorted. "Yeah, like they let the researcher with no security clearance at their profiles? Good one."

He drew himself up. "Write this down, little human." He traced two phoneme sets in the sand, one after the other.

She copied, hurriedly. "Let me guess," she said, and drew the signifying set the Autobots used for a sentient being. "Like this?"

Faster than she could even register to flinch, his enormous clawed hand sliced over her shoulder, cutting clean through several sheets of paper. Her marker went flying. He traced the first two phoneme sets again, and paused, tapping her pad with one of his finger-barbs. "Copy," he ordered. She grabbed for another marker and copied the sets down again, trying not to notice that her hands were shaking.

"Now this." He sketched out three more sets of characters, pausing between each one to make sure she'd copied them correctly. "That," he said, "is my name."

She looked at what she had written. "The phonetics are star and scream." She'd actually heard of him. He must be important. She wondered again, even more uncomfortably, why they'd given him over to her project. "And these…?" She squinted at the last one. "That's a number, right?"

"Correct." It was a big number, too. "The number of cycles I have served the cause."

He tapped the back of his finger barb over the next character to the left. "And this?"

"That's what? Wait. That's 'air' or 'heaven' or something, right?" She pointed to a cluster in the set.

"Air…commander." His barb traced the two parts on her paper with more motor control than she would have credited.

She lifted an eyebrow at him. "That sounds impressive."

"I am."

"Modest, too."

"Modesty is for the weak." It was probably some sort of reverse Stockholm Syndrome, but she found his arrogance kind of endearing.

"And the next?" he prompted.

"What are you, my teacher now?"

"Human, if you wish to learn, you must learn as I instruct." He must be a pain in the ass to work under, she thought. She'd like to see him in a room with a few of the NEST commanders.

"Let's see. This is the character for someone who does something. So this is also a title or rank or something, right?"

"Yes. Figure it out." He seemed to be enjoying this.

"This is…I've seen this before. It's to chase? No, to look for, right?"

"And together?" She shot him a look. "Human," he managed to sound long-suffering, "if you do not figure it out yourself, you have not learned it." She was going to argue that he'd given her all the other words this afternoon without this kind of runaround, but then he might decide to use this approach even more tomorrow.

"Searcher? Quester? Something like that?"

"Seeker," he corrected. He paused, obviously waiting for her to be impressed. "You do not know what that means?"

"I told you, they don't let me look at their files." She couldn't help but feel a little defensive. She was tired of feeling stupid and out of the loop.

"I wonder what else they hide from you," he said, though he didn't really seem to be talking to her.

"So, what's a Seeker?"

"I will tell you later, little human." He gave her a measuring look. "You must also have a name, correct?"

"Do you know how our names work?"

"I know they have only sounds and you have more than one of them. I do not know what they mean."

"Okay. Mine is Jennifer Silver. Silver is a family name, meaning that's the same name my mom and dad and sister have." She paused, realizing he might not know family terms.

"Your progenitors."

Close enough. "Yes."

"And the Jennifer?" He stumbled slightly over the name.

"That's my specific name."

His eyes unfocussed for a second. "There are many Jennifers according to statistics. It cannot be your specific name."

"It is."

"It is an imprecise system, Jennifer Silver."

Okay, and now the glamor of his arrogance had worn off and he was just annoying. "At least we have a word for 'apology.'"

"A useless word, as I have told you." That strange appraising look glinted across his face. "You may, however, acquaint me with a subsidiary concept more clearly."

"And what might that be?"  
"If you wish to compensate me for your perceived fault—this is 'amends', yes?—then I require energon."

She laughed. "That's not how you're supposed to do it. I'm supposed to offer something."

"What if I do not need or require what you offer?"

"Then we negotiate."

He thought for a moment. "Consider, then, Jennifer human, that I have merely omitted the useless steps in the process and come to the end of our negotiation."

"It has to be in my power to get for you."

"Is it not?" A sort of look that told her he'd think her even more puny and weak than he already did.

"Uh, I'll see what I can do." She knew a guy who could help her—a fellow grad student. And he did owe her a favor. "Anything else while I'm at it?" she asked, sarcastically.

Sarcasm was apparently beyond him. "I can also utilize coolant. Seventy of your gallons or so."

Oh, this guy was too much. "And I suppose you want this now."

"I am not unreasonable, Jennifer human. Tomorrow will suffice."


	2. Chapter 2

**Day Two **

**0720H **

**Diego Garcia Dining Facility **

She was beginning to think that they slept. She knew the Autobots had some sort of power-recharging mode which they called sleep, but she'd always thought that was just a rough equivalence. But for the second night, she heard her robot—call him by his name, she corrected herself—Starscream—repeat something over and over, dully, exactly the way people talked in their sleep in the movies. She wondered if they dreamed. Maybe they'd get to that today.

But first, she'd promised—somehow—she'd try to get him some of the energon stuff he said he needed. And by the time she'd finished brushing her teeth, she even thought she had a way to get it.

"Max!" she said, "Can I sit here?" Without waiting for him to answer, she plopped her breakfast tray down next to his. Sure it was a little heavy-handed, but most of the hard science guys were a little low on the social skills. A stereotype, of course, but a true one, at least among the DG contingent.

Max looked like he might have had an older brother who looked like Adonis; the one who got all the good looks in all the right proportions. Max himself had some good features—the cleft chin, the high cheekbones, the glossy black hair—but somehow they didn't come together quite right. And his 'bent over a lab table' hunch didn't help much.

"Jennifer?" He squinted at her.

She laughed, a little giggly-girly. "Surprised to see me out of my lair?"

"Kind of."

"Felt the need for a change of scenery." She dug into her allegedly-scrambled eggs. "So, how's things with you—you have a research proposal yet?" He was a Mech E, and their graduate student process was much different from hers. On the plus side for them, theirs often involved corporate subsidies. And no kiddie pools.

"I'm working on something. Hey," he dropped his voice conspiratorially. "I hear you have a, you know, one of them." He dropped his voice even further to a stage whisper. "In your lab."

This was going to be easier than she thought. Good. Compared to yesterday, she'd take a day where things actually went smoothly. And right. "Oh, you mean my Decepticon?" she said, breezily. "Yeah, he's pretty awesome." _That_ was a stretch, but she wasn't going to screw this up by not baiting the lure heavily enough.

"Is it—I mean, he I guess?—is he helping?"

"Fantastic. Can't shut him up."

"Wow." Max's blue eyes radiated pure envy. "Lucky."

"Why, what are you up to?"

Max started crumpling up his napkin. "You know, just maintenance stuff, still. Don't get me wrong, it's really cool and all, but…."  
"But it's not research." The graduate student dilemma.

"Yeah. And they're really careful what they let me take a look at."

Jennifer took a slow drink of her orange juice. "Hey. I have an idea. You want to come take a look at him?"

Ooops, might have pushed too hard. His eyes hooded warily. "You know they wouldn't like it."

"Do you tell them everything? Come on, what's the harm?"

Max considered, twisting the napkin into pulp. "I could come by after my rounds this morning. I have to bring my cart right by there."

Oh, he was hooked. "Can you help me with something, too?" She tried to look clueless-humanities as possible. "He says he needs coolant. Could you check? I mean, it's no good if he overheats and freezes up or whatever—"

"Seizes up," Max supplied.

"Exactly. No good to my project that way. And I'm thinking, coolant. I mean, that doesn't sound dangerous. It's not like he's asking for jet fuel or anything, right?" Wheedle.

Max considered. "They're normally pretty good at knowing what they need. Tell you what. I'll throw some extra coolant on my cart this morning. I'll have to check him out first to see if he's legit." Oh, really, don't do yourself any favors, there, Max.

"That would be great."

Max nodded abruptly, and gathered up his tray. He stopped. "Oh, and Jennifer? Don't tell anyone about this."

1030H Hangar F3

"Whoa. Whoooooa. Wow." Max had been saying this collection of syllables for a few minutes now, since he'd entered F3. He'd been walking a slow circle around the suspended robot since he came in, his cart left just inside the door. He was now staring up at the robot's twin jets with a look most people save for their first communion.

Starscream looked at Jennifer. "Is this some kind of sonic diagnostic?"

"No, he's just…impressed."

"Impressed is acceptable. But I think he has spent sufficient time being impressed."

"Right." She'd been sitting at one of her consoles, running a filtering program on her new words looking for common roots. She pushed herself off the chair. "Hey, Max? Come over here and get properly introduced." She shot a warning look at Starscream.

"Introduced, yeah." Max popped out from behind the robot's back and waved. "Hi. I'm Max. You're huge." Maybe she should have spared the warning look for Max.

"Max," she said, patiently. "This is Starscream. I asked you to take a little look at him?"

"Wow, yeah, right." He dug in his coveralls for some tools. Froze. "Uh, it's all right, right? I mean, he's not going to, you know, like, squish me or anything."

Starscream ignored Max and addressed his remark to Jennifer. "Your kind overestimates their importance. I have not once set out deliberately to destroy—or 'squish'—humans."

"Max, you're fine," Jennifer said.

Mumbling to himself, he stalked around the robot's chassis, tracing something visually under several pieces of armor plating. "…and that's an auxiliary line…that comes up…here and—there it is!" He dove out of sight behind what looked like a strut and came out a few minutes later, wiping his hands on his coveralls. "He sure needs coolant. Actually he needs a full drain." He indicated where he'd wiped his hands. "See the curdled stuff? Coolant breaks down like this after a while." He turned to the robot for the first time. "Can we do a gravity drain?" He added, aside to Jennifer, "Not going to do anything without his permission."

"You may." He stretched his amputated leg out, indicating a valve. "It is best to do it from there."

"Great." Max pulled out a wrench. "How long since you've had a full drain of coolant? That stuff looks pretty gunky."

"One does not have time for such luxuries in the middle of a war."

"Yeah, well," Max was concentrating on fighting with the valve cap, "You've got the time now. Aha!" The valve cap gave with a squeak. He straightened up. "Hey, Jen? I've got to go back and get some more coolant and grease for this," He held up a battered looking valve-cap. "Can you make sure the coolant is still draining?"

Max set up the hose she'd swiped from F2 two nights ago and had just been too lazy to put back and aimed it into the coolant system's intake. "This will help flush the gunky stuff, and will keep him from seizing. He shouldn't move around too much, though, just in case." Max looked at the suspension harness as if seeing it for the first time, "Uhh, not like he can move around much. Anyway, I'll be back in a few minutes."

Jennifer crouched where Max had positioned her, watching what looked like blue cottage cheese slowly seep out of the valve. "Hey, Max? It's kind of clogged up."

Max gave an impatient sigh. "Clear it out. You know, with your hands? Jeez. It's just _coolant_." He rolled his eyes as he left.

"Just coolant," she repeated. "Right. I can do this." Though, after her last encounter with alien-robot fluids, she wasn't really eager to get introduced to another one. "Ewww, it's squishy." It reminded her of very lumpy tapioca. Except blue. "Oh, gross gross gross." She scooped a handful out of the valve. Still nothing but squishy stuff. It felt like she was reaching her hands into a bunch of eyeballs. She reached further up. Her hands were small, but the narrow valve scraped her knuckles. She wiggled her fingers and pulled her hand out. She was coated from fingertips nearly to the elbow in clumpy goo. "Oh…super gross." Trying to scrape it off her hand, she merely managed to get it all over her other hand.

But her cleaning was rewarded by a thin trickle of liquid, that slowly grew a little stronger. Above her (and from her position kneeling on the floor, there was an awful lot of him above her) the robot gave a little shudder. More and more of the clotty stuff began trickling out. She grabbed a ratty pushbroom and aimed a mound of the gunk toward the drain in the center of the floor. Whoever had built the hangars had expected some serious drainage issues. She wasn't sure it was set up for clotted coolant, though.

Starscream gave another shiver.

She squatted back on her heels. "Does it hurt?"

Starscream tipped his chin down at her. "A warrior is trained to withstand pain."

She looked at her hands, coated in clotty blue, which now dripped slowly down the broomhandle. "Max will be back soon. I hope."

Almost on cue, Max came back, wheeling another cart piled with equipment. "Piece of cake," he said. "Got coolant, an electrical pump and some other stuff. Sometimes being the low monkey works out."

"Maybe for you."

"Yeah, well, not everyone's lucky enough to get a solo project, Silver." He shuttled his equipment to different places and came over to watch the growing lake of clumpy blue spreading around her feet. "Yeah, that looks pretty good. Another minute and we can cap it and start replacing it. I'll shut the hose." He looked up at the robot. "Try to be as still as possible for a minute, okay?"

"I will be still." It sounded like the robot didn't like the word 'try'.

Max pulled the water hose from the intake. "Let me know when the flow really cuts down, okay? A little water's fine in coolant, but we don't want to dilute it too much." He came over when she signalled. "Great. Now we cap it." He produced the valve cap, which now had a thick coat of grease on it, and screwed it tight. "And now we start filling."

The electrical pump kicked to life, buzzing like a hive. "And, coolant in," Max said. He seemed to enjoy having an audience to explain things for. The robot gave that strange shudder again, his eyelids shuttering down.

"Max, is it supposed to hurt?"

"Coolant? No way." He ran grease-blackened hand through his hair. "From what I understand, it actually feels pretty good."

"Really?"

"Yeah, you know, like when you get really dirty and then take long hot shower? Kind of like that."

She squinted at the robot again. "Maybe you did it wrong?"

"Jen. You seriously think he'd let me do something wrong? Besides, one thing I've learned in my three exciting months here on the DG is how to change coolant."

"Fair enough."

"Oh, and I got some other stuff, too. I couldn't get straight energon—they keep that stuff way away from peons like me. But I did get a bunch of the slurry the chem guys have been working on."

"Slurry? What is that, some kind of drink?"

He laughed his 'oh, such clueless people, these non-scientists' laugh. "Kind of. You see, apparently there's some energon here on Earth. The stuff we've found, the stuff their sensors have led us to so far has been pretty dilute stuff. So we've been working on ways to refine it. You know, purify it a bit."

"You're not giving him anything experimental, are you?"

"No way. They don't let me near that stuff either. But I do have access to the low grade stuff. It's not the best, and it takes a lot to deliver any punch, but, well, we have a lot." She still looked doubtful, because he added, "It's the same stuff I gave the Autobots this morning. Word of honor."

The pump kicked off loudly. "Time to put in the other barrel. He's got a huge coolant system." Max wrestled the other barrel into position, wiry muscles popping on his gangly arms. "Must be a flight thing." He gestured to Jennifer to carry the empty barrel back to the cart. "And here you go, big guy," he said, and kicked the pump back on again with a flourish. The robot gave a low grunt, his eyes still closed. "See?" Max said. "I don't think that's a hurt sound."

"What, you're the language expert now?"

He laughed. "Right. No, but I've been around enough robots to recognize a happy sound when I hear one. Want to hear more?" He trotted back to his cart and dragged off another barrel with a series of hoses. "I saw this intake earlier, so this'll be easy," he said, ducking his head under a shoulder plate, snaking one of the hoses with him. "Push the red button," he said from under the plate. As Jennifer did, another, quieter engine muttered to life, and she saw the black rubber-looking hose start to vibrate.

Max jumped down off the rib strut he'd been standing on. "Watch this, if you want to see happy robot."

The robot's head tipped back, giving another soft metallic grunt. His good hand curled into a ball, and released like a cat kneading a cushion. All right, she conceded, he sure didn't look like he was in pain.  
"Thanks, Max. Really."

"You really want to thank me?"

"Uhhh, I think so?" She hoped Max wasn't going to get weird on her.

His eyes glittered. "Can I get some schematics from him? Just some pictures and measurements. Of anything. I'm really not picky."

"How about his face?"

"His face? Oh, I see." Max looked up. "That's probably important."

"It does slur his speech a bit." It didn't really, but Max didn't have to know that. Max didn't answer: he tucked a few things from his cart into his coverall pockets and started climbing the robot's chest like he was a giant jungle-gym. Starscream didn't even seem to notice the extra weight—he remained slumped back in his shoulder harness, feeling, well, whatever he was feeling. Why would he tell her it hurt if it didn't?

She watched Max tinker for a while, alternating between measuring and photographing to messing with some tools. That got boring fast, so she turned back to her computer program, trying to trace out roots for the words she knew. The program wasn't infallible—a few times already she'd spotted similar elements in words that the program didn't have in its database. Hence, her redundant and very low tech system of index cards. Slow work, but it absorbed her entire attention, so she heard nothing until Max tapped her on the shoulder.

"Jeez! Don't jump like that!" Max backed off a step. "Sorry. Just wanted to say I'm done, okay? Well," that glitter in his eye again, "Done for right now. Maybe you wouldn't mind if I checked up tomorrow a bit? You know, routine maintenance and all that." He meant to get more measurements and photographs. Why not?

"Any time, Max. Thanks. Really."

"Heh. Don't mention it." He waved his pocket computer. "I might find my own research project yet." He linked both of his carts and pushed them slowly through the side door.

All right, time to settle this one right now. She dropped off her chair and approached the robot. "How are you feeling?"

"I am functioning."

"Is that all you have to say?"

"Jennifer human. Surely you have noticed I am still missing a leg, and my right hand is…nonfunctional." True. She'd forgotten about that—she'd already gotten so used to those injuries they didn't even rate with her. The jaw had, because she'd spent so much time staring up at his face already.

"How is your jaw?"

"At the present time, it itches." He paused. "But it is significantly improved." Maybe he was a little weak on the concept of gratitude. Scratch the 'maybe' part.

"And the rest?"  
"The rest?"

"The coolant, the energon-stuff?"

"Ah. Yes. I accept your amends, Jennifer human."

She bit down on her tongue. "And?"

"And…the next time I require something I shall make sure that you are in an apology position again." Okay, he really wasn't getting something here. Change the subject. Before you hurt your hands trying to punch him.

"What I meant was, why did you tell me it hurt?"

"I did not tell you it hurt."

"Really? When I asked if it hurt what did you say? Something about a warrior being trained to take pain or something?"

"That is not the same as saying that the coolant drain itself hurt."

"Are you kidding me? It's context! It's the freakin' Maxim of Relevance!"

"Maybe we do not have this maxim on my world."

"Oh, I think you do. I definitely think you do. But what I find more interesting is why you would want me to think you were in pain. Care to clarify that point?"

"I do not."

"Why?"

"Because your question is invalid. I did not intend to mislead you. It was an unaccustomed feeling. I did not know how to process it. I do not have one of your words to describe it."

"And so pain was the first word that jumped to mind?"  
"Yes."

She hated to admit it, but that made a kind of sense. In fact, she was starting to get a new theory, instead of mere Universal Grammar. Linguists argued that language in a sense creates perception—that someone with no experience of snow wouldn't have a word for it. So if they encountered it for the first time, they would be unable to describe or understand it. And she'd just seen an example right here. What other things did he not have words for?

"And now? How would you describe it?"

He cocked his head to one side. "It was…not painful. Interesting."

"Max said the other robots say it feels good."

"I suppose."

"Say it."

"What is it you wish me to say?" Was he playing obtuse? This was getting interesting.

"I wish you to say that it felt good." Now she was starting to sound like him.

"Why?"

She laughed. "Actually, pretty much because you're so resistant to saying it. It's not a sign of weakness to admit that something wasn't horrible."

"If it would gratify you…. It felt…good?"

Well, that was probably as close as he was going to get. She sighed. "Close enough. Max said he'll be back tomorrow, if that's okay."

"And if I say no?"

"Then you say no. I just don't see how that would benefit you though. I mean, he comes once, and look at all the stuff you got. Let him come a few more times and he might be able to do something about your hand."

"That is an astute point."

"Thanks. Just trying to see things how a narcissistic arrogant bastard would see them." She wondered if he knew those words. She turned back to her computer, hiking herself up on the lab-table chair she'd been given as surplus.

"What are you doing?"

"What does it look like I'm doing? Work."

"You can do that later. Now is the time for you to learn new words."

"I still have half of the ones from yesterday I haven't gone through."

"Jennifer human." He managed to sound on the edge of his patience. "I do not know how much longer they will keep me functional."

"And I'm supposed to believe that you desperately want your dying legacy to be a lexicon?"

"No. I simply do not want the empty time to be able to dwell on my future."

"Oh." What the hell do you say to that? She certainly couldn't offer any assurances.

"It is, of course, all about me. The what? Narcissistic arrogant something?"

"Yeah, forget I said that, okay?"

**1440H **

"Knock-knock, awww, what the hell is this?"

Jennifer jumped up from the perch she'd taken against the robot's upper leg. It had just been more convenient to lean against something. She supposed it did look, well, silly at the very least. Starscream's hand stopped, halfway through writing a word, wary. He had a reason to be: the NEST team and Ratchet were back.

Another soldier barked a laugh. "Don't they look cozy?"

"We're doing research. That's why you let me have him, right? The question is what are you doing here?"

"We were here yesterday, remember?"

"Didn't you do enough to him back then? Or did you find some more indignities you want to put him through?"

"Miss Silver," Ratchet said, standing up from his vehicle mode. "We told you yesterday that he regenerates ammunition for his weaponry. That needs to be neutralized."

"Every day?"

"For the foreseeable future, yes."

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask how long the 'foreseeable future' was, but she was afraid she might not want to know. Still, it sounded like Starscream's termination wasn't on the short agenda.

A hand grabbed her arm. She recognized the Tennessean soldier from yesterday. "Why don't we let them do their job, ma'am?"

She shook his arm off. "I'm not in their way."

"Still, maybe it's better…"

"You gave me that line yesterday. If what you're doing is so damned okay, why can't I watch?"

The soldier looked back at Ratchet, who gave another human-like shrug. The soldier gave her shoulder a warning shake. "Fine. But see you stay out of the way."

She rolled her eyes at the back of his head. Stupid threat.

She had to admit she was a little surprised at the robot's compliance. He did not move until they prompted him, held his arms where they wanted him to, waited while they dragged a plastic bin into position to catch the falling rounds, didn't even flinch as one soldier used a prybar to lift one of the plates on his arm.

The next few minutes were filled with the rattling sound of rounds, hundreds of them, falling into the catch bins. The robot stared stiffly ahead, as if willing himself somewhere else. The soldiers kept shooting her dark looks as they worked. She divided her attention between Starscream and the soldiers. Finally, they wheeled the full bins over by the door. Ratchet gestured for them to leave and then walked behind the suspended bot. Starscream tried to follow him with his eyes, apprehensive. He was more or less helpless, and Ratchet was one of the enemy. Jennifer couldn't stand it. "What are you doing back there?"

"I am checking the seals on the governors we installed yesterday. He has not tried to operate these, has he?"

"I'm pretty sure I would have heard that."

"Yes, you would have. Sooner or later we are going to have to vent the fuel tank. Before it builds up too much pressure. Not yet, though." He laid what was probably meant to be a comforting hand on Starscream's shoulder plate. The robot flinched. Ratchet withdrew his hand, slowly.  
"Miss Silver, may I speak to you outside for a moment?"

Starscream and she exchanged confused looks. Clutching her notepad and recorder, she followed Ratchet out of her hangar and down the corridor into F1. The room was buzzing with Autobots, chatting, repairing equipment, joking with one of the NEST teams. The robot didn't speak until he stopped in front of a screen. "Miss Silver, I am concerned about your interaction with the Decepticon."

"My interaction? It's research. It's why you gave him to me?" She was starting to sound like a broken record.

"My concern is that you might be confusing compliance with compassion. He is not a nice bot."

"He's been okay to me," she said, defensively. "Better than some of your guys have been."

Ratchet sighed. "This is part of my point. You are thinking of us as 'your guys' and not as 'us'. And his obedience is quite possibly part of a larger strategy. I suspect he is trying to manipulate you."

"So he's not allowed to be open about the fact that he's trying to get something from me, is that what you're saying?"

"What is he trying to get from you?"  
She shrugged, realizing she ran her mouth. "He's a little worried that at any moment one of you will come in there and blow his head off."

"Miss Silver, we do not operate like that. Surely you know that."

"Do I?"

"We have no plans to terminate him. That I can assure you." He turned back to the screen. "But more importantly, I want you to watch this." He set a file to run, and she saw a series of battle footage, of varying quality. The clips showed Starscream, as he must look upright and functional, fighting ferociously. "You see," Ratchet said at one point. "Those are human pilots in those airplanes he is attacking. Do not let him tell you he does not harm humans." At another point, he paused the playback. "And this. He is attacking another Decepticon. His own side." Ratchet resumed the playback. On the screen, Starscream tore off the other bot's head with one hand, his barbed hands sunk deep into the head plates. The head plates suddenly buckled. The camera caught the sparking from the crushed bot's eyes. "Have you seen enough?"

She nodded.

"Please understand, Miss Silver. I am merely concerned for you. I did not want to have to show you these…atrocities. I do not think he would hesitate for a second to do to you…any of those things. He has no respect for your human lives. He has no respect for the lives of his own kind. Do not trust him."

"Yes," she said, a little weakly. It was a little overwhelming. Okay, more than a little. Those long fingers that had spent half the afternoon patiently circling parts of words for her, prompting her to translate—they had been deep inside the skull of one of his own side. It was a bit much to take. Her own skull felt suddenly eggshell thin.

Ratchet relaxed. "Good. Now, is he really helping you with your research?"

"Yes. Really, he is."

"I am sorry we have been too busy to be able to assist you more thoroughly ourselves."

She shrugged, uncomfortable. "It's okay. I know you're busy." (Killing other robots) she almost added.

"We are willing to assist you, of course."  
"Of course." She had a sudden idea. Let's put that to the test. "Actually, if you've got a second, there is something he says that I don't know. Could you write it out for me?" She dug out her recorder, and rewound it to the tape she'd made overnight, as he mumbled in his sleep. Or whatever he called it. Ratchet listened, a puzzled look coming over his face. "He says this to you?"

"Not exactly. But he mumbles it a lot." She held out her pad. Ratchet's smaller fingers could manage, if awkwardly, to grasp one of her thicker markers. He wrote quickly, almost as if ashamed of what he was writing. Something tickled in the back of her mind as something she'd seen before. A semantic bit from another word. She shook her head. "What's it mean?"

"It is not a nice word."

She tilted her chin at him, impatiently.

"The closest word you have would be 'stupid.'"

"There's more to it?"

"Yes, but…I am not good with languages. You might ask someone else."

Ironhide rumbled by, caught sight of his least-favorite human, and looked over her shoulder at the pad. "Finally learning to say something useful, are you?"

Ratchet waved Ironhide off with one hand. "Ignore him," he said. "But know that this," he tapped the pad, "this is what your Decepticon thinks of you."

It's not, she thought to herself. I think it's what he thinks of himself.

**1740H **

She didn't know what to think or feel as she reentered F3, so she tried not to do either. She felt Starscream's eyes on her as she put her pad down on her workstation, aimlessly tidying the junk: microrecorder cassettes, index cards, paper clips and the like.

After a painfully long moment, the robot said, "Do I need to guess what he said to you?"

"Can you?" She stayed by her desk. Somehow right now she did not want to be close to him. She kept thinking of his hands buried in the other robot's skull.

Starscream traced the line of his repaired jaw with one long finger. "I have been at this for a long time. They are predictable."

"So? Let's hear your guess."

"Only if you tell me if I am correct. Which I will be."

She leaned back against her workstation, folding her arms. "All right."

"He told you that I am vicious. That I have done…horrible things. That I am ruthless and conniving." He paused.

"Yes."

He nodded. "He also told you that I am trying to manipulate you. Control you." Another pause for verification. She nodded.

He looked up at the ceiling. "Jennifer human, we are fighting a war. Not over some line on a map or some abstract idea. At this point, my kind is fighting for its very survival. There are no rules for that. Rules are luxuries for those who can afford to draw abstract lines. We cannot. Our line is life, or death." A quick look at her, then away again. It was like he didn't want to watch her reaction.

"But one can have personal principles. That is what prevents one from falling into insanity. I am not using you any more than you have seen."

Another pause. "I make no secret of the fact I would like to escape from here. And I do not pretend to hide that should any Autobots get killed in the process, I would not be overly distressed. But I will not get you caught up in some escape plan. I will not ask you to betray your own kind." Another flying glance, almost as if he was afraid of what he'd see. "Because you have not asked me to betray mine."

He looked over at the door, which was out of his line of vision. "But he probably told you not to trust anything I say."

Jennifer shifted uncomfortably. He was uncanny. And it didn't clear anything up at all. If he were smart enough to have figured out what Ratchet had said, he was probably also smart enough to try to turn it into a manipulative ploy, exactly like this. She scrambled for something to say, and blurted, "Did it hurt?"

"It was not good. To have to say that."

"I meant when they took all of your ammunition. They were really rough with those pry bars."

"Is this your maxim of irrelevance?" he said, sourly. "Yes, that was uncomfortable as well. And humiliating."

"I'm sorry."

"I wish you had not stayed to watch. I do not want you to see…that."

"I'll leave next time, if that's what you want."

"Please do not attend when he vents my fuel tank."

"Is that worse?"

"Significantly. It is also messy. Imagine someone controlling one of your bodily functions, against your will. Like," he paused, searching for a comparison. "Your bladder, yes?"

Oh, that would be humiliating. She winced. "That bad?"

"Yes."

She felt so sorry for him—stuck with her to talk to, maimed, and surrounded by enemies. No, she told herself. Straighten up. You saw what Ratchet showed you. He's a killer, unprincipled, amoral. A thug. He told you himself he beats those under him if they fail. Yes, but he admitted it himself. He hadn't tried to hide that from you at all. She shook her head. She just wanted a dissertation out of this. She wasn't equipped for these ethical debates. She'd gotten a C+ in her only semester in philosophy. "I just don't know what to do."

"Jennifer human, shall I tell you a story?"

"Will it help?"

"Probably not. But I shall tell it anyway." He gestured for her get a little closer. She dragged her chair over reluctantly. Right now she wasn't in the mood to lean against his upper leg again. "When I was very young in command—not my first mission, but very early on—I had a spy in my ranks. Every mission I led, the Autobots knew every detail of our attack—our approach vectors, our mission goals, our armaments, everything. Sometimes they laid ambushes for us. Sometimes they quietly patched the security breaches we had researched and counted on, or doubled the guard, or moved whatever we were hoping to find somewhere else. That sort of thing. A string of very costly failures.

"My troops' numbers were dwindling, and every battle brought them closer to the edge of complete breakdown. This was still early days in the war. No one had grown into their warrior status yet. We were all trying very hard to pretend otherwise, though.

"Anyway, I knew we had an informer. And so I started watching my troops with suspicion. Every thing they did I tried to take note of. Who they spoke with, when they did self-maintenance, where they positioned themselves in a line, whether or not they wanted to go off by themselves, who they contacted back on Cybertron. I was looking for any clue. I was desperate to find the traitor, the traitor who had cost us so many missions, and so many good bots. If I did not find him, the blame would all be mine. I did not know whom I could trust. So I trusted no one. We were all in constant anxiety. Mine bordered on terror. All that responsibility, all those lives…. Fighting a war is hard enough; fighting a war against treachery is too much to ask, especially of new soldiers.

"There seemed to me to be only one way to find the traitor. I briefed a mission. A fake one. Completely false goals, waypoints, security beacon codes, everything. I was determined to solve this without asking anyone above me for help. I did not want them to know anything until I presented them with the spy for punishment."

"That whole 'we don't fail' thing, huh?"

"Yes, exactly." He seemed pleased she had remembered that much.

"So, what happened? Did you catch the spy?"

"Of course," he looked a little insulted. "I gave two alternate routes through a series of low hills. One was textbook perfect for an ambush. They could choose which path they wished to get to a waypoint. I overflew the terrain. And one of my troops gathered as many of the others together and took them straight into the ambush."

"He was the spy?"

"And a coward. He placed himself at the rear of the formation, where he would have a chance to dive for cover."

"And the rest?"  
He shrugged as if this part of the story were irrelevant. "Half were killed or died later of their injuries. Others were injured. One went mad from the pain of his wounds and had to be compassionately terminated."

"And the point of this story is…what, exactly?"

"Are you not listening, Jennifer human? Everyone was suspicious to me. I was half-mad myself from trying to know whom to trust. You cannot know. You can never know whom you can trust. Trying to know will drive you insane." He flexed his good hand. Jennifer had another flashback of those fingers sunk into another robot's skull. "At some point, at some level, you must let go of knowing anything, even the enemy. And be prepared to shoot it out if you're wrong."

"Interesting moral."

"It has not been a moral war, Jennifer human."

"Do you miss it?"

"War? Yes." He looked sadly at the half-melted barrels of his right arm's chain gun. "It is what I was made to do."

"You can do something else, if you wanted to, though. I mean, you did something before the war, didn't you?"

"I could not go back to that. I have been this," he gestured with his barbed hands, "for far too long."

"But, well, the NEST guys, half of them are counting the days til their enlistments run out. They're always talking about what they're going to do back home, when it's all over, or all over for them, at any rate."

The robot made a scoffing sound. "Cheap contract soldiers."

"And the Autobots—"

"I prefer you not compare me unfavorably to them."

"Uh. Oh, okay. Right."

"Jennifer human, you have your study of languages. You were not born knowing these things, these theories and maxims. You had to learn them, acquire them, yes?"  
"Of course."

"And it affects how you think of yourself. You think of yourself as one who studies language. Who knows these theories."

"Yes."

"So if someone were to tell you that you could never study languages, any of them, again, not even for a…hobby?" he groped for the word, "you would not like that."

"No. I guess not."

"It would attack your sense of who you were. It would take you from being good at one thing, important at one thing, and make you very bad and very unimportant at something else."

"Is that why you're fighting this war? Your self-concept?"

"It is part: under the Autobots those like me would have no place." He shifted his amputated leg. "They have no place for warriors. We would be reviled, and eventually forgotten entirely. I do not wish to die being despised. But worse to be forgotten."

He looked down at his mangled leg sadly for a long moment. "I should not, I think, talk so much."


	3. Chapter 3

Day Three

**0730H**

**Dining Facility**

"Wait: you don't know what today is?" Max had sought her out at breakfast. She shook her head.

"It's the twenty-fourth? The twenty-fourth? You know, the conference? In Geneva?" He stuffed a slice of buttered toast in his mouth.

"Still not ringing any bells, Max. Sorry."

He rolled his eyes, and swallowed a mass of half-chewed toast quickly. "All the big shots will be there. Which means, they won't be _here_." His face split into an enormous grin. "And guess what I found last night? Oh hell, you'll never guess. But guess anyway."

"From the way you're acting, I'm going to have to say amphetamines?"

"Ha! Good one! Not even close, though." He leaned in closer. "I found a certain," he paused and waggled his eyebrows conspicuously, "leg."

"What? Ohhhhh. Oh, wow. You mean it's here?"

"Been here the whole time. Of course the tenured geeks kept it all to themselves. Greedy bastards," he paused to shoot a hateful look at another table. "They're more or less done with it, of course. Did all the tests they could think of, copied down every measurement and performance measure they could find. And, they want it kept on the DL from the Autobots."

"Why? I thought, you know, all that 'one big happy family' thing?"

Max turned his attention to his fruit salad. "Yeah, right. You know better—why'd DoD approve your project? Us gearheads aren't stupid, you know. And some of them—the senior geeks, that is—are getting a bit fed up with Mr Robo Boss not sharing his toys with us."

"He's afraid you're going to use it to make weapons."

"Jeez, you sound just like him, Jen. Look. We're American engineers. We can weaponize toothpaste if we wanted to. We're the guys who brought you the microwave. And do you know what you can do with mayonnaise?"

She waved a hand in front of him. "Max, Max. Hey, back here on earth, guy."

"Oh, yeah, sorry. Anyway. My point is it's stupid because even the few things they let us see, like elbow joints and the like, we can totally militarize. The whole transforming technology, we're about a year away from getting that right. At most. So we're tired of getting the Autobot bread crumbs. This…" he paused as someone walked behind him with a full tray. "This appendage is a godsend. And last night they packed it away for safekeeping. And like I was saying, because we want to keep it quiet from the big bots, they just boxed it up in a corner of yours truly's storage area."

"So?"

"So?!"

"Well, so what? How's it look?"

"It's intact. They've had to repair parts of the blast damage but as far as I can tell it's in good order."

"And?"  
"And…." He looked around him again, nervously. "I was wondering if, you know, I could bring it over. Tonight. After everyone left."

She shook her head. "Max, I don't want to be dense, but, why?"

"Because I decided that that is my project. This is the one thing that we've never been allowed to see with the Autobots. We know they've lost limbs, we know they get reattached, but we've never seen the process."

"And you want to do that."

He looked at her like she'd finally gotten a new brain. "Yeeeeeeesss."

"I don't want to, you know, like pee in your cheerios or something, but someone's bound to notice that he's got his other foot back." She thought nervously of the NEST disarmament team. Ratchet would notice for sure.

"We'll think of something." Max was entirely unconcerned. He saw his PhD singing to him like a mermaid on a rock. "Worst comes to worst we can remove it again. Cleanly, though."

"Well, okay." She did not have a good feeling about this. "Tonight, right?"

A couple of the NEST soldiers from the disarmament team walked by. Max grabbed her hand theatrically. "Yes, tonight. Just you and me." The soldiers snickered.

1050H Hangar F3

Starscream was in good spirits that day. His jaw no longer itched, and his right hand had stopped screaming in pain at him, which meant the sensor endings were rerouting. It's true, he was getting a little tired of the never changing windowless view of the hangar, and he was losing hope of any kind of escape, but for the moment, things could have been worse. The Max human had brought over external joint lubricant, and explained to the Jennifer human that it prevented a bot who was more or less immobile from joint lock. She'd spent most of the morning working it into the joints of his legs. It felt…good.

He told her so.

"You see?" she said, bending over to work some of the lubricant into an interior joint, "That wasn't so hard to admit, was it?"

"It is an unaccustomed sensation."

She sat back on her heels. "That's kind of sad, don't you think? That you fight and according to you, win, all the time, and you never get to sit down and actually feel anything good?"

"It would lead to weakness."

"Right. That's my job. Just weaken the hell out of you."

"I fear that has already happened."

"So," she said, more serious than she'd intended. "Do you want me to stop?"

A long silence. "No."

She worked in silence for a while, moving up from his hip joint to the complicated series of overlapping plates in his lower abdomen. "So, why do you follow this Megatron guy, anyway? I mean, it sounds like you're terrified of him and he beats the snot out of you and all."

"A good ruler rules through fear."

"Do you?"

"I…try. I think my troops do not fear me enough."

Jennifer made some non-committal sound, but the comment really caught her attention. Did that mean he didn't punish them as often as he'd claimed he did? "So, why do you follow this guy, other than he's scary as hell?"

He said a word in Cybertronian. Paused. "I do not find an acceptable translation."

"Well, let's see it." She stood up, wiping her hands on the coveralls.

He traced a word in the sand. "My translation protocol suggests the English word 'love,' but I find that inaccurate."

"And a little weird," Jennifer added.

"Yes, possibly."

"Okay," she walked over to the sand and indicated a section of the word. "This is 'loyalty' or 'faith', right?"

"Correct."

"And this?"

"Death."

"So altogether, loyalty and death? Loyalty until death? Something like that?"

"Yes. Something like that."

"Yeah, that's nothing like 'love.'"

"I suspected not."

"But that's what your translation told you it was?"  
"It suggested it as the closest."

"Hunh."

"I am unfamiliar with that word as well."

"Oh, sorry. Just thinking. This is a word we don't have an English word for. And you're not sure that 'love' is the best translation—what is your word for 'love'?"

He stopped for a moment, in that gesture she was coming to recognize as consulting his processor. "We do not have one."

"None at all? Not even for 'I love nachos' or 'I love a good friend'?"

He shook his head. "For the first, we would say 'prefer'. For the second we would use a modified version of this word." He gestured back to the word in the sand. "The 'death' part would be changed to something less…terminal."

"Wow. Weird."

"Is it?"

"Yeah. I'm pretty sure the other guys have a word for it."

"Then I suspect they do not have this word."

"Then why do you think they follow Optimus?"

He rolled his eyes. "I have no idea."

She sighed. "You know I'm going to have to write this one down."

"Of course."

As she grabbed her marker and pad, she began to feel some excitement build. This was more evidence, not only that language colored reality, but that the two kinds of robots did not, in a real sense, speak the same language. They had a high degree of mutual intelligibility, but they had diverged and isolated for so long—how long? She would have to find out—that they had begun to grow apart. And without a common language, without a common frame of reference, of course there could be no lasting peace.

"Hey, Starscream?"

He looked up. He had been flexing and contracting the toes of his remaining leg as though the exercise amused him.

"Do you have a word for 'peace'? You know, like, the opposite of war?" She knew the Autobots' word for this—she scrambled through an older sketchbook until she found it. The robot had traced another word in the sand.

"Our word is this." Switching into teacher mode, he traced some circles in the air over elements in the word. "Victory," he said, "Completion. Honor." She scribbled the word down, along with his translation.

Not at all the same. She flashed her pad up at him. "This is how the Autobots write it."

He studied it. "I have never seen that word."

"Can you break it down?"

Another head tilt. He copied the word down in the sand and stared at it for a long moment. "This," he said, eventually, "is spark. The other elements I do not know."

Jennifer flipped to a clean sheet of paper. "I'm going to go ask."

1055H

Tarmac

There was no one in Hangar F2, which was the maintenance bay. Only a few people—humans, thus useless, in F1. Jeez. The place was normally crawling with robots, and when you needed one, where the hell were they? She trotted across the tarmac, blinking in the sudden blaze of sunlight. In windowless F3, she'd gotten completely foreign to the concept of daylight.

Clomping across the tarmac, and looking about as pleased to see her as ever, was Ironhide. Well, she thought, beggars can't be choosers. She ran after him. "Ironhide," she said, catching up. He slowed down, marginally. "How would you say 'love,' like 'I love you'?"

"I wouldn't," he said, flatly, and picked up his pace again. "Ever."

She should have expected that. She jogged gamely after him. Wherever he was going, there were probably more bots. He didn't like her, but that was only a matter of degree—he really didn't seem to care that much for humans in general. Therefore, if he's going to hang out some place, there would be other Autobots. Less jerky ones. Though that was probably also a matter of degree.

The door to Hangar bay C1 loomed open, and she could see in its shadowy interior a flurry of movement. Bingo.

Someone was fiddling with a projector over by one wall. This room was huge, much bigger than the F-sized hangar, and packed with people and robots chatting as they waited for something to happen. Jennifer searched the room with her eyes. Who would help her? Ratchet was near enough. She cut through the crowd, dimly aware that she was the only human not in some military type get-up. And that they seemed surprised to see her there.

"Hey, Ratchet, you got a sec?"  
"Now is not a good time, Miss Silver. We are awaiting a briefing."

"Yeah, but real quick. I mean, while you're waiting, could I just ask you one or two things?"

He exchanged a look with Ironhide, who clomped around behind her. "We're busy right now."

"Right now all you're busy doing is telling me how busy you are. You could have helped me and I'd be on my way by now. Especially you, Ironhide."

"Oh, this. I want no part of this thing." The black robot backed away from her.

"Look. Just look at this. Have you ever seen this word before?" She flashed the victory/honor word Starscream had given her.

"I have seen it. On Decepticon dispatches. We do not use this word."

"Okay, great. Superfast, then," The noise around them started dying down. The briefing must be about to begin. "How would you write the word for love."

"What kind?"

"How many kinds do you have?"

Ratchet looked over her shoulder at the front of the room. "I have never counted. Which one is it most important you know right now?"

"Love like between two friends, maybe? Do you have that kind?"

"Yes." He took the pad and scribbled out a word. "Now, really, Miss Silver, you're not supposed to be here. You must go. I will try to find some time to stop by later to assist you more thoroughly, but for now, I really must attend this."

Well, dismissed. And she believed his promise like she'd believed all the other promises he and the others had made to help her. Still, the staring had started to turn to grumbling. She beat a hasty retreat.

**1238H**

**Hangar F3**

"This is that part that you said means 'spark', right?"

"It appears to be. What word is this?"

"This is what he said the word for love was. Or one of them. Apparently they have lots of words for it."

"Inefficient," Starscream spat.

"Maybe their language has a lot of nuances."

He dropped into his 'processing' mode for a moment. Probably to define 'nuances.' "Then their language is easily misinterpreted. That is a liability in war."

"Wow, you guys really build your whole lives around war, don't you?"

"We are warriors."

The side door clanged open. Too soon to be the disarmament goons. Worse. It was Colonel Axelrod. "What the goddamn hell did you think you were doing?" He started yelling as soon as his foot crossed the threshold. No way she was going to control this conversation, he was going to make damn sure of that.

Well, she had a few things she had to say to him, too. "Sir, I'm supposed to be getting actual research help from the Autobots. I've been here for over a month and I've gotten precisely 300 words from them. That's less than 8 a day. That's pathetic. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of waiting around for someone to remember they're supposed to be helping me. I needed help, I went out to find some."

"You walked in on a highly classified briefing!" His neck veins popped up large and red.

"The hangar door was wide open!"

"You delayed the dissemination of some vital information."

"By what? About five seconds? Maybe if I'd had my regularly scheduled meetings like I was promised, it wouldn't have happened. Hell, maybe if they transcribed my tapes like they're supposed to, it wouldn't have happened. I don't really like barging into your stupid little testosterone fests—as you'd notice I've never done before—but I got sick of waiting. I'm so behind schedule it's not even funny, and you're upset about a few second's delay for unveiling one of your stupid powerpoints?!"

"And what was so damned important? More of your stupid words!" He snatched her notepad from her hands and threw it across the floor of the hangar. Loose papers skittered free. He turned his attention to her workstation. "Look at these. More words. Don't you have enough yet?" He nearly slapped her with a handful of index cards.

She twitched reflexively. "Those words I got in the last few days. Please don't mess up my piles."

Colonel Axelrod threw them after her notepad. "Let me tell you something, Miss Silver. We have put up with your stupid research project. We've given you half of a whole hangar—"

"A quarter of one," she corrected, "and one without climate control."

"That's not the point. We have more important missions than yours right now. What's the point of your stupid research if the bad guys win? There won't be any humans left. Much less humans with the time to think about stupid academic points."

"Have you even read my proposal?"

He bulldozed her question. "What everyone else around here except you realizes, Miss Silver, is that your whole project is entirely redundant. We already have a Cybertronian to English dictionary: We have the Autobots. We don't need you."

"But that's not what—"

He held his hands up in front of his face. "Spare me, will you? Spare me the ivory tower snivelling. We have bigger things going on right now. We have an operation about to kick off the magnitude of which, well, if you could ever get your head out of your stupid research to even think about it, would blow your mind." He leaned in closer. "I do not want to see you for the next 48 hours. I am restricting you to the latrine, the chow hall, and here. Stay out of my goddam hair. And when it's over, we'll see if we can squeeze in your stupid project." He turned on his heel, his stomp to the door faltering when he slipped on one of her scattered index cards.

**1309H **

Jennifer became acutely aware that the Decepticon was staring at her. She joked weakly, "Well, that didn't go so well."

She turned to the wreck of her notes on the floor. The pad had settled face up, the word Ratchet had told her meant 'stupid' on top. Fitting. She bent down to gather up her cards, and burst into tears. Not the pretty kind, either. The loud, slurpy messy kind. It was just so unfair! All she wanted to do was her research. She'd been over the moon when her project—of the 700 or so submitted—got selected. And since then she'd been pretty much trying not to confront disappointment every day, as first the military, and then the Autobots, broke their promises to help her. And they'd finally thrown her a bone, in a crippled Decepticon, like she was some kind of Prisoner of War torment. Her notes were muddled, all of her neat piles and categories completely destroyed. It would take hours to sort them back out again. And right now it didn't feel worth the effort. She threw the handful of cards she'd collected back on the floor.  
"Jennifer human, are you in pain?"

She wiped her eyes, realizing stupidly that she was still in the coveralls she'd worn to put on the joint lubricant. Had all of this happened in one day? "Not really. It's just not worth it."

"What?"

"This whole thing." She spread her hands to take in the whole room. "He's right. This is just redundant. Anything they want to know about the language, an Autobot could tell them in five seconds. They don't need this."

"He is not right. Being right and being in charge are not always the same."

"That's nice of you to say, but…"

"I do not say things to be nice, whatever the Autobots might have told you. Military leaders are forced to see things in terms of victory and defeat. Magnifying one, minimizing the other. Long term value to a warrior means the next battle, or, at furthest, the next campaign. There is a saying we have about this: a commander can only see to the range of his longest weapon."

He cocked his head to the side door. "I imagine his weapon is very short."

Jennifer smiled, a little, and tried to blink her tears away. How stupid, crying like a baby in front of one of the scariest Decepticons there was. How even more absurd that the robot had just cracked what seemed like a joke. To cheer her up.

He seemed to hesitate, and then said, "They have promised to do things for you and not done them?"

"Yes," she said. She braced herself defensively. She wasn't soft enough to fall for the old 'they let you down therefore they're bad, and I'm the good guy' line. "But they have a lot of more important things to do."

"I should not excuse their failure to perform so easily." Oh, here it comes. "What have they promised that they have not done?" Well, that wasn't what she was expecting.

She looked back down at the floor. It seemed so…irrelevant now. "What haven't they? For one thing, I was supposed to get a high-tech pressure light table. Instead, you see Mr. Froggie's Lilypond over there, filled with very high tech sand, imported all the way from right outside the hangar door. My contract states that I was supposed to get a half hour a week with each of them. You know, try to track regional variation, education level, that kind of thing. There was the disclaimer that it could be adjusted 'to the needs of the military mission.' Which always had more needs than I did. So then it changed to four hours of taped conversation per week, that they were supposed to transcribe and translate for me. You know, to get actual conversational syntax. Harder for me to analyze, but still, big chunks of syntax. Would probably take one robot half an hour to do the whole thing. I got the conversations. They never did even one of them. Again, needs of the mission." She was almost hyperventilating, she was so angry.

"Where did you get these conversations?"

"In F1. They even helped me hook up the remote recording device."

"Will they not be watching what they say, knowing they are being recorded?  
"There are lots of studies about that, actually, which I brought up while we were negotiating. See, people, humans, we forget. You can put a television camera some place, have a million signs that the person's being recorded, and somehow, they just go blind to it. In a few hours, with a recording device, people will forget they're being recorded entirely."

"Did the same thing happen with the Autobots?"

She shifted impatiently. "Hello? They never translated the conversations for me? They could be spending four hours of randomly selected time a week reading the phone book for all I know."

"Yes, that is true." He pushed a few of the cards together clumsily with his long fingers. "Jennifer human, perhaps I could translate them for you?"

"Uh, I don't think that's a great idea."

"Why not? It seems a valid solution to me."

"Yeah, well, I didn't just get four hours a week. Once I realized they were going to screw me on this too, I just started taping everything. I guess I thought I'd manage to find some sort of Rosetta stone if I got enough." She walked to her workstation and opened a drawer full of CDs. "That's way too much to ask."

"Allow me to try. Some done is better than nothing, yes?"

"But you heard Colonel Axelrod: the whole project is useless."

"You know he does not understand how your project is…evolving."

She looked at the wreck of her notes. "Honestly, right now, I don't even want to think about language. Not even my own."

"You will consider my offer."

"Yes, I promise." She sighed. "I should at least clean this up." She started scraping together the cards in a pile.

"Jennifer human," the robot said, abruptly. "Where did you learn that word?" It was out of his reach, but he pointed at the pad. She raced over and snatched the pad, flipping it quickly to another section.

"I don't know. Somewhere." She was acutely aware of what a terrible liar she was.

"You must never use that word. It is very…unpleasant."

"Uh, okay." Why was he so hung up on this? He used it every night in his sleep.

He gave her a strange sidelong look. Could he tell she was lying? "I know," he said. "The Autobots have used that word. To describe me."

She didn't know what to do. It was a plausible scenario. What did she gain from denying it? And for all she knew, they might have. She had no reason to believe they were civil in their opinions of their enemies.

"I don't remember," she said.

"Do you know what it means?"

"Not really. They said it was something like 'stupid.'"

He gave a non-committal grunt. "It is like your profanity."

"Okay."

"You must not put that word in your research."

"I won't. Promise. I'm not even sure I have any research at the moment. I just want to clean this mess up. And then all I want to do is just stare at a blank wall for a while."

The robot gestured in front of him. "This wall is sufficiently void of distractions."

**1620H **

The disarmament team came by an hour later. Jennifer had taken up Starscream's recommendation of the blank wall, perched on his upper leg, leaning against his torso. Even though he was lumpy and cold, it was sort of comforting. At least there was a living being who didn't have better things to do. Of course, he was more or less trapped with her, but right now, she'd take it. She pushed herself up as the side door whined open.. "I'll leave, okay?"

"No," he said. The NEST soldiers jumped back. It was the first time he'd spoken in their presence. He announced to the team, "The Jennifer human will perform the necessary actions."

The team leader exploded. "Absolutely not! She doesn't know what she's doing."

"You may stay to supervise if you wish. I will direct her through the necessary steps."

The team leader protested to Ratchet, loudly. Jennifer stood by the robot's leg, uncertain what she should do. "Didn't you say this hurt?" she asked. She wasn't keen on hurting him.

"It will be less uncomfortable this way." Maybe for him. She didn't much like the idea of doing something deliberately painful to another creature. That was why she'd gone into nice human language research instead of neuropsych. Even the thought of planting all those electrodes on animal brains…ugh! This was the girl who got grossed out by coolant, after all.

Ratchet calmed the NEST leader down, gesturing with his hands as if he were trying to push the human's voice down. "We shall be right here, Lieutenant," he said. "Who performs the process is irrelevant." It may have been a trick of her ears, but Ratchet sounded, for him, a little short-tempered.

The team grudgingly dragged the bins over and placed them where they had before. Starscream lowered his left hand to the ground. "Climb up," he said. "You saw the hatch yesterday. Go to it."

"This one?" It had some scoring in the paint from the prybar.

"Yes. If you reach under, you will find a release."

She found something that had some give to it and pushed it away from her. The hatch popped open easily. So the prybar had been unnecessary. That made her dully angry at the NEST soldiers.

"Occasionally in battle," Starscream said, in what Jennifer recognized as his teaching voice, "one runs out of ammunition and needs to be able to rearm quickly. This is the speedloading hatch. Please step back," he said, "Yes, above the joint. The speedloader has a reverse gearing mechanism, which I will now demonstrate. There is some significant recoil accompanying this action so you might consider holding on to something." He tipped his forearm upward. A mechanism began clacking, and bullets spewed from the hatch into the bin below, faster than the previous day. In under a minute, the bin was full and the mechanism was gearing on empty air.

"What next?" Jennifer said.

"Next, we must empty the rounds that are already chambered. Please step forward." He lowered his forearm parallel to the ground. "I shall rotate the barrels and open the breeches. You will remove the rounds." One by one he cycled the barrels of the chain gun past her, stopping each one so she could pull out the round.

"You mean you've been armed this whole time?" The NEST lieutenant had gone from angry-red to pale. The thought that he had been carrying enough rounds in the barrels of his chain gun to wipe out the disarmament team was more than a little unsettling.

"I was not armed the night I was brought here. Obviously."

"Why didn't you tell us this before?"

"You did not ask."

"Why now?"

"It amuses me to demonstrate your ignorance." An answer that struck Jennifer as being completely like him. "The chain gun's rotating mechanism will require some lubricant later, Jennifer human. For now, the other side." He raised his arm over his chest so she could step from one arm to another. She felt like a rather unbalanced parrot. They repeated the process with his injured arm, and then he put her down, carefully. He tilted the empty, gaping hatches toward the lieutenant. "Sufficient?"

"Fine," the team leader replied, sullen. "We'll remember about the chambered rounds, you know." He tried to make it sound like a threat.

"I presume you shall at least try. Now you have what you came for. You may leave." An echo of what he must be like as a leader. As arrogant as she'd thought. Somehow, though, in the circumstances, it was nice to see someone in a military uniform blustering and powerless.

The team lodged another protest with Ratchet, but he waved them away. Definitely short-tempered, Jennifer thought. Maybe he got a sample of Colonel Axelrod's charm as well.

Ratchet checked the governors again. "It is going to have to be today," he said. "The fuel tank. I will be…," he paused, as if catching himself. "I will be unable to perform it tomorrow. Any longer and you will be uncomfortable."

"And since when do you concern yourself with my comfort, Autobot?"

Ratchet sighed. "I do what I can. Miss Silver, it is best if you leave."

She nodded.

"She does not have to. Let her see the decency and mercy of her Autobot friends, if she chooses."

"Starscream," Ratchet said, "This is necessary. We are not brutes."

"Not brutes!" The suspending chains thrummed together as Starscream tried to turn to face Ratchet, waving his melted right hand. "Not brutes. Who else but a brute would leave this injury untreated? Cycles it has been. Where was your Autobot decency? And do you let your own kind suffer from joint death?" He twitched the stump of his leg.

Ratchet avoided meeting his eye. "We have not had the time. I am sorry."

"I suspect you grow tired of saying that. I know I would easily tire of hearing it." He slumped back into his harness. "Do what very little you can, then. I note that it is the procedure most humiliating and least curative. But she can stay or not stay by her own will." She didn't really want to stay. And he'd said earlier he didn't want her to watch. His entire turnaround on that point could simply be a desire to power play the Autobot.

"You'll be okay?" she asked. And realize what a stupid question it was.

"I will endure, Jennifer human. Your consideration is appreciated," he said, acidly, making sure that Ratchet heard.

**1652H **

The room felt about a hundred degrees hotter when she went in twenty minutes later. A large burn scorched the floor and had blistered the paint on the wall behind the robot's back. The air reeked of something like kerosene but heavier. Jennifer hit the main hangar door release, trying to give the robot some time to pull himself together, and get some fresh air into the room. Whatever the smell was, it didn't smell healthy. Several times through the steel door she thought she heard something that sounded like a howl or screech of pain.

"I appreciate you not staying, Jennifer human," he said. "It is…shameful."

"What did he do?" Tactless question. As soon as she said it she wished she'd taken it back.

"It is a simple procedure," he said dully. "The fuel lines are pierced, and the governors reverse the flow. Instead of the fuel going into the engines, it vaporizes above. And then the governors fire the ignition and the vaporized fuel ignites. The fuel line is self-sealing to prevent the entire tank from ever catching fire, so it must be reopened several times. He performed the cuts poorly, as you can see, and fuel leaked to the floor."

She remembered the piercing screams she'd heard through the door. "I-I don't know what to say."

"Why would you need to say something? You did not perform this."

"It just sounds…awful."

"It is, to be honest, Jennifer human, a form of torture we employ."

"But he said it was…."

"Yes. Venting the fuel line before it overpressurized."

"That's not true?"

"It is true. But doing it for that reason does not make it less painful to endure."

She sat heavily on the floor, covering her face with her hands. "I'm so sorry."

"You need not be."

"Yeah, I know. My feelings don't really change much for you, do they?"

"It is done, Jennifer human. And it has not been the first time. It is something we undergo as part of our warrior tempering."

"You let your own side do that?"

"It is not a matter of 'let'. It is a matter of being a warrior."

"How many times?" This was getting pretty ghastly.

"My fuel line has been replaced three times. Figure that each line can undergo about four or five ventings before it is too scarred to run the fuel properly." That made at least a dozen.

"And?"

"And?"

"You've done this? To someone else?"

"It is an honor to be asked." An image flashed in her mind—those same taloned hands which had crushed a skull of one of his own slicing open another robot's back. She shuddered. He picked up that she was upset, and added, "A warrior needs to be able to withstand pain."

"Withstand is one thing. Actively seek it out?"

"We consider that it allows a warrior to discover his weaknesses before they are fatal."

"And so what have you discovered? What are your 'weaknesses'?"

"Ah. You know them already, Jennifer human. Even though I can endure pain, I still fear it. And I am afraid to die."

"Everyone has those weaknesses."

"Not on my side." He rubbed his damaged hand. "And of course I have my fragile pride." He gestured to the open hangar bay door. "Night has come, Jennifer human. I suspect they shall want you to close the door."

Good point: all she needed was to have her name appear on the night guard's report to be waved under Colonel Axelrod's already hairy eyeball in the morning. She crossed over and hit the button. The door protested all the way down its track. "And now," the robot continued, "If you wish to owe me more amends, I do have more use for the external joint lubricant." Manipulative little bastard, she thought. But she smiled in spite of herself.

**2338H **

It felt like she'd just stripped off her lubricant-coated coveralls and closed her eyes in her cot when she heard a quiet but persistent tapping at the side door. Couldn't be more NEST guys—they didn't seem too up on the concept of knocking. And yet, of course, they'd flipped when she'd walked through a wide open door into one of their super secret manly man meetings. Whatever.

She cracked the door open. Oh rats, Max. She'd entirely forgotten about him.

"Hey, are you going to let me in? I really don't want to be caught out here with this, you know."

'Yeah," she shoved the door wider. "Come on in."

Starscream's eyes glowed to their brightest color. If he'd been dozing before, he was wide awake now. He raised one eyelid at her, questioning.

"Uh, yeah. Starscream. I forgot to tell you about, well…. It's really Max's thing, so I'm going to let him explain."

Max was still riding the euphoria of his brilliant idea. "Last night I found your leg." He tapped a wooden crate he'd dragged in on his usual maintenance cart. Okay, that was a bit shorter an explanation than Jennifer was hoping for.

"It's been here for a while," she added. "The scientists have been studying it."

"So the Autobots have let them prod and tinker with…." The robot looked angry.

"No way," Max said. "The Autobots didn't know it was here. Still don't know."

"So it is the human scientists I should punish."

Max's voice cracked, "Uh, no. Maybe not. Not all of us. I mean, look, I brought it back to you, didn't I?"

"And for what purpose, Max human?"

"Actually, I was hoping to reattach it. Kind of."

"Kind of hoping or kind of reattach? Your language is imprecise."

"Well," Max stepped so that the crate was between him and the robot. "Both, actually. I've never seen a limb reattached. None of us have."

"Human, I will not let you remove it once it is attached. I will not deceive you about that."

Max looked at Jennifer. She shrugged. "He's not really prone to lying," she said. "It's up to you. How bad do you want to see what happens?"

Max squeezed the frame of the crate as if trying to squeeze some sense out of the wood. "Oh, man," he said. "We're going to get in so much trouble…."

"Who is this 'we'? You want your own project, you have to get ready to stand up to the big men themselves." Jennifer thought back sourly to Colonel Axelrod. Might be nice to have some company on the Colonel's frowny-face list.

"Well," Max thought. "Research can't be unresearched. And if I find anything good, something we can use, the big geeks will cover my ass, I'm sure. And maybe I'm pretty done with DG." It sounded less like he was talking himself into it than he was inventing an alibi. He wheeled the crate over to the robot's right side and opened it. Jennifer saw nothing but a mass of rags. "You sure you got the right box? That looks like laundry day."

Max rolled his eyes. "Oiled cloth? To keep the metal from corroding? Trust me, I needed the hydraulic lifter to get this thing on the cart." He squinted up at the robot. "In fact, I'm going to need some help getting it out."

The robot lifted the mass of oily looking rags out of the crate, and juggled it between his hands as Max and Jennifer tugged away large sheets of cloth until they revealed the limb itself It lacked the scorching and pitting of the upper leg, but it seemed like it would fit the rough shape from having been torn—or blown—off.

"All right," Max said, pausing to set a video recorder on the top of the crate where it would record everything. "So, this is the amputated limb. We can see where it will match up to the living specimen." Jennifer cleared her throat loudly. Max corrected, "Not specimen, the subject." He dug in the drawers of his cart. "When bringing him in, the robot engineers—medics, maybe?—clamped off any leaking hose, and you can see here," he gestured to a lump of foam, "insulating foam on the electricals. This is done to stabilize the subject. The subject has been without his limb for seventy two hours."

"Seventy five," Starscream corrected. "A bit more." On the video recorder he was only a massive ripped off knee. His voice sounded disembodied and far away.

"Correction, ummm, more than seventy-five hours. In case there has been atrophy or decay in the clamped off hoses, I have brought lengths to bridge the gaps." He turned to Jennifer, gesturing for her to push down on one of the hoses on the foot. He paused. "Any sequence to reattaching these lines?"

"I do not think so. I have not studied this field extensively—we have repair bots for this. But I believe that the power core must be last."

"It's going to hurt like a mother if you're wrong," Max said, warningly.

"I suspect it will hurt even if I am correct. Nonetheless I would like my limb back and functional."

Max took a deep breath. "Okay." He turned over his shoulder to the recorder. "For the record. First, we'll do coolant, then interior joint fluid. Then let's do hydraulic." He looked up to the robot. "Make sense?"

The robot shifted in the harness, like a shrug. "You are the scientist, Max human."

The next several minutes were filled with Max bent over the connection point, bridging the hoses inside his replacements and removing the hose clamps with a clatter.

The hydraulic system released with a sound like a mechanical sigh.

"Good?" Max asked.

"I can feel nothing until the core is run," Starscream said. But he was watching the procedure with interest. Well, Jennifer imagined she'd look pretty happy herself if she was getting a leg back.

"Okay, let me just double check what we've got for no leaks…and….looks good so far."

"The fluid pressure is not dropping," Starscream supplied.

"That leaves the electric—the core." Max jumped off the robot's leg to gather a canvas bucket of tools and hopped back on. He spoke to his camera again. "Obviously, the current they run would fry me in about a microsecond. That's not good for my future as a brilliant engineer, of course," he flashed what seemed to be a pretty forced smile. "So this," he held up what looked like a small paint can, "Is foam solvent. We place the cables together. Contact is prevented by the insulating foam. The foam solvent is ion activated. It will eat through the foam and in about thirty seconds or so, bingo!"

He cut the foam's lumpy edges flat so they laid more evenly against the cables from the foot. Another deep breath. "Here goes." He tugged a mask to cover his nose and mouth and sprayed the solvent heavily, then jumped off and ran as though he'd just set a bomb.

The seconds seemed to stretch. Jennifer swore she counted to thirty at least three times. The robot was watching his limb, his eyes narrowed. She was just about to ask Max if the solvent was bad when a bluish spark illuminated the room with a loud electrical snap. Starscream howled, writhing in his harness. Above him, the suspension gantry shook. His hands, good and bad, clawed deep scratches in the reinforced concrete floor. The sound was unbearable—the highest and the lowest pitches she could imagine, both full volume.

"Stop it! You're hurting him you idiot!"  
"I can't stop it," Max yelled, back, his face white. "I don't know what I did wrong! I attached everything right, and he said the order didn't matter."

"Maybe it does. He said he didn't know." She shoved him backwards. "You're supposed to be the expert!" The keening sound was like a drill right into the base of her brain. She could swear she felt her teeth rattle in her jaw.

Max clamped his hand over his ears. "I can't even think over all this noise!"

Jennifer was going to scream back that 'all this noise' was his fault when the shrieking noise stopped entirely. The robot slumped back heavily against the suspension harness.

"Ah, that's better," Max said.  
"Yeah, much better. Congratulations, science boy, I think you made him pass out."

"Pass out? Can they even do that?"

"You'd better hope so, because the only other thing I can think of is he's dead."

"No," Max said climbing back onto the leg, "He can't be dead. Electrical overload would short out, maybe, but his major systems are grounded."

"Okay, then, you just discovered a new way to torture them. Keep it up and you'll be in Geneva getting a prize."

"Hey!" Max barked. "Don't talk like that. I didn't mean anything bad to happen." He squatted down. "Besides, I don't even know what I did."

"Yeah, that's kind of obvious." She was torn between anger and worry. Max's experiment seemed bad enough when she thought their only problem would be what to do to prevent anyone else from knowing. She touched the robot's inner arm, and stopped, feeling like an idiot. Robots don't have pulses in their wrists. If anything got shorted out, it seemed to be her common sense.

The hand twitched, a sudden involuntary spasm. "Did you undo it?" she called back to Max.

"No, it's fused together. I can't get it apart with what I brought here." She heard him add a curse.

The robot's head rolled to one side with a groan.

A banging at the side door. Jennifer froze. Someone must have heard the robot's howling. She gestured for Max to get down, and cut off the lights before she opened the door. A NEST guard stood there, maglite held in front of him like a weapon. "Everything all right in there?"

Jennifer leaned against the door frame, trying to block as much of his view of the darkened hangar as possible. "In here? Fine. Everything's fine."

"I heard a noise."

"A noise? Really? Wow. Well, I do snore. Maybe that's what you heard."

His gaze went from suspicious to hostile. "Through six feet of concrete?"

"Okay. Look," she shot a look behind her, hoping Max, and more importantly the leg, were out of view. "My, erm, my guest has bad dreams."

"The Decepticon? Bad dreams?" He wrinkled his nose. "Seriously?"

Well, it wasn't a total lie, as far as she knew. She nodded.

"Awww, poor baby," the guard said, sarcastically. "And so he cries like a bit ol' pansy?"

She opened her palms to the guard. "You heard it, didn't you? I think he was reliving that thing Ratchet did to him today. He made noise then, too."

"I wasn't on shift this afternoon."

"Well, you can go, you know, look it up or something. I'm sure it's there." She moved to close the door.

"Now, wait a minute, ma'am." He pushed her aside, flashing his light around. Whether he was conscious or not, Starscream hung limply in the harness, looking completely non-threatening. His left leg blocked the soldier's view of the right side of his body. The guard straightened up. "All right, I guess there's nothing going on here."

"Not a thing." Shut up shutup shutup, part of her brain yelled. Right then, off to the robot's right side, a metallic clunk.

The guard pushed his way past her, drawing his sidearm. "I heard that. Come out, now. Into the light. Hands up."

Jennifer felt her heart pounding against her ribs. She looked around for something, her brain formulating a crazy idea probably stolen from some bad movie somewhere. Hit the guard in the head with a pipe or a book or a sock full of quarters or something. Only she had nothing to use. She really doubted the markers she always carried with her would do the job.

Max stepped into the light, blinking, his shirt off, the light picking out his ribs. Maybe the flashlight made him look so pale. His hands, raw and red knuckled, shook over his head. "Just me."

"You? You're one of the maintenance guys." Jennifer saw Max's jaw clench. He hated being thought of as a 'maintenance guy'. "What are you doing here?"

Max's mouth worked, trying to come up with a plausible story.

"We're together," Jennifer blurted. "It's really hard to get any privacy, you know, and so…." She shrugged, she hoped convincingly embarrassed. She hoped Max caught on and didn't blow it.

The guard registered comprehension. "Like together together."

"Yeah."

"Can I put my arms down, now?" Max said.

The guard grinned. "Yeah, whatever. Jesus. Geeks in love. No wonder you gave your robot nightmares." Laughing at his own joke, he left.

"God, that was close!" Max whispered, as though the guard could now hear anything above a whisper.

"Close? Are you kidding me? And what the hell happened to your shirt?"

"It had interior joint fluid all over it. If he'd seen me in a shirt with wet splotches all over it—"

She cut him off with a hand. "Please don't finish that thought."

"We still need to figure out what to do with _him_," Max jerked his thumb.

"What options are you considering?" Starscream interrupted. His voice sounded a little tinny, but it was at least coherent.

Max jumped, clutching his t-shirt to his chest. "I don't even know what went wrong."

"The metal is wrong." The robot's eyes drooped closed.

"'The metal is wrong'? What the hell does that mean?"

No answer.

"Come on," Max said. "I'm no good at this riddle stuff. What do you mean the metal is wrong?"

The robot managed one blurt of a Cybertronian word. Max turned to her. "All right, language genius."

"Inert, or lifeless. Dead. Something like that."

"Inert? Of course metal's inert, what the hell's he talking about?"

Jennifer got it suddenly, like a splinter of clarity sliced through her skull. "Wait. You said that the other guys had to repair it, right?"

"Yeah. They used comparisons with the existing leg for most of the schematics."

"But they had to replace some of the metal, too, right?"

"Yeah. From what I saw in the file pictures, some had been sheared away. Some melted."

"So what did they replace it with?"

"The same stuff. Same molecular weight, conductive properties, tensile strength, everything."

"But it's still not the same, is it?"

He blinked at her. "Of course it's the same. I just got done telling you that."

"No, no it isn't." She started pacing. "Think about it. If we cut out like your liver or something and gave you mine instead, what would happen?"

"I don't know, I didn't go premed."

"Oh, stuff it. You've seen enough bad hospital dramas. What happens?"

"Well, unless we've been like donor matched or something I would probably reject it."

"Exactly. Even though it's the same…molecular weight, and all that other stuff."

Max looked over his shoulder at the robot's leg. "So you think he's going to reject it?" His eyes glittered eagerly. She could see another chapter in his research writing itself, titled something like 'chemical match rejection in robot limb reattachment.'

"I will not." And the robot was back online. "New sensors will generate in the bad metal. It merely takes time."

"Really?" Max's eyes glowed. "So, like you can transmute any metal to be your skin or your servos or something?"

"As far as I understand, yes."

"Is there anything we can do to help?"

The eyelids opened slowly. "I would most appreciate if I could be out of this suspension harness. If only for a few hours."

Max looked to Jennifer as if for permission. She hesitated.

"It is not my intent to harm either of you. Nor to get you in trouble. You may come in the morning and I will comply at the reattachment of the harness. Just for a few hours. Please."

It was the 'please' that did it for her. "Get him down."

That was a more involved process than they thought, partly because it was only the two of them working on it. Second, in his thrashing, the robot had managed to tangle several of the harness chains. Max held up a few links. "These aren't designed to hold against force," he said, showing where the link closures had been pulled apart. Jennifer almost fell from the gantry once, and Max dropped half the contents of his pockets when one of the chains gave and he flipped upside down, but all things considered, it could have gone worse. His engineer's neatness caused Max to arrange the whole thing where they could put it back on quickly in the morning.

And then she was left alone with the robot. He had settled himself half-prone, his good arm curled under his torso. His injured leg rested gingerly on the concrete.

"If I'd known it was going to hurt that much," she said, "I probably wouldn't have let him do it." She hadn't been this close to his head since they brought him in. Each of his eyes, she noted, was the size of her skull.

"If I had known, I probably would not have stopped him. It is painful, but it is done. And a warrior with two legs is better than one without." He paused, his eyelids squeezing shut for a long moment. "It will improve."

She could feel heat from his eyes when the lids were opened. The metal from his cheekplates retained some of the warmth. She traced the line of the edge of the plate.

"Jennifer human, what are you doing?" The eyes flickered open again.

"Oh, sorry," she said, jerking her hand away. "Stupid human thing, I guess. Not like it helps you feel any better."

He considered this for a moment. "If it makes you feel better, you may continue." The eyelids dropped closed. A moment later they slit open and he made a sound like a laugh. "Stupid human."


	4. Chapter 4

**Day Four**

**0848H**

**Hangar F3 **

"Wow, you can totally see it now. Jen, come here. You've got to see this!" Max gestured excitedly. "See? The metal was all one color last night. See how blotchy it is now? That's the stuff they replaced. It's already turning." He began filming, alternating shots between the original and the newly replaced leg. "And how is it moving today?"

"The performance is marginal." The lower leg whined in protest as he moved it to demonstrate. "But it is improving." He turned his head. "No, slightly lower. Under the third strut." Jennifer tugged the canvas-covered chain of the suspension harness down as hard as she could. The robot settled his chassis into the sling. "One of them is caught behind my right aileron."

Jennifer jumped down off the cart she'd been standing on to adjust the harness. The engineers had made it look so easy when they did it the first time. She was sure that if any of them were to look at it now they'd find a hundred things wrong. Despite Max's best efforts, some of the chains had gotten twisted, and one of them had snapped when they tried to put the robot's weight onto it. And Starscream had been as good as his word about getting back into it, despite the painfully obvious fact that two unarmed humans really couldn't make him do anything he didn't want to do.

Max was still snapping pictures of the leg, so Jennifer sighed and picked her way up the robot's chest. She still wasn't used to the idea of putting her entire weight on him, even though she weighed less than the NEST soldiers, and they'd climbed all over him like he was a floormat.

"Which one?" She knelt at the top of the robot's shoulder.

"This one." He flapped one of his metal plates. "You see it?"

"Yeah. I see where it's caught." She flopped down to her belly, reaching for the caught chain. Just out of reach. She sat back. "Can't get it."

"Try again, I will assist you."

As she reached for the chain again, the robot shifted the plate forward. The plate caught her fingers against another piece of metal.

"Ouch! Okay, stop!"

"Did I injure you, Jennifer human?"

She yanked her fingers out of the way. One nail was bleeding, but compared to what he'd been through, she didn't feel quite right complaining. "Don't worry about it. I'll try to be more careful."

"Perhaps it would be better if Max assisted you."

"Good idea. Max!" she turned around. "Where the hell are you, anyway?"

He popped out from under the joint's knee. "I'm just looking for something. I lost my phone last night. I was thinking that it might have fallen out when we were undoing the harness."

"Did you find it?"

"Not yet."

"Are you sure you had it?"  
"Pretty sure."

"I'll look around for it later. Right now we should probably fix this before anyone misses you."

"Right." He started climbing up next to her. "Don't think we have to worry too much about that, though."

"I thought you were maintenance monkey for the Autobots?"

"Yeah, don't remind me." He scowled. "But that's what I mean. This place is like a ghost town. I think everyone's gone."

"Not everyone."

"Well, you know. Most of the soldiers. That guard from last night wasn't even the regular guy. And I haven't gotten a blip from an Autobot yet."

"Hunh." Maybe this was the big deal the colonel had going on with his fancy powerpoints. "Well, more time before we get busted, then, I guess."

"Yeah, I thought of that." Max reached down behind the aileron. "Can't quite reach…hey, can you grab my legs so I don't fall over? Great….hold on, there you go!" He jerked a length of chain, which rattled free. "Success!"

"Seriously, Max," she said, hauling him back. "What the heck are you going to do? They're bound to notice."

"Yeah, I do know that." He wiped his forehead. "It depends how long we can go without them noticing. Another day and the big geeks will start trickling back from Geneva. If I can let one or two of them in on it, we're golden. I'd have to share credit, but, well, there are a lot worse alternatives."

"Don't remind me."

"Oh, come on, it's not like they would actually kill us or anything. The worst they can do is yell at us and send us back to the real world. And think about how much that wouldn't suck: Arby's Horsey Sauce, Snickers bars, People in real clothes,. HBO series…. Look, I'm just saying it's not all bad."

"I suppose you're right," she said, following him down the robot's body. "There's only so much they can do. To us." She didn't want to admit she was worried what they might do to the Decepticon.

**1820H **

To prove Max's theory, even the disarmament team was different from the usual one. They noticed nothing unusual. They didn't even protest when she offered to do the work for them. All the leader seemed interested in was checking off items from a clipboard. "Hatches empty and cleared. Okay. Barrels empty and cleared. Check. Suspension harness." He looked up. "Looks okay. All right, guys, we're done. Roll it out." And they were gone.

Starscream insisted on taking a look at her recordings. He'd shown her how to connect him to her computer and she spent the next few hours trying to reorder her vocabulary cards, pausing to switch out CDs when the drives popped open. Her hard drive was filling up with files faster than she could keep track. If only the Autobots were this cooperative!

"You can take a break any time you want," she eventually said, yawning. "It's not like we have a deadline."

"I would like to help you while I can. As you and Max have said, when they discover my leg has been reattached, we do not know what will happen."

"Good point, but, I feel guilty making you work this hard. It's very boring."

"It is easily done. But I will stop if you wish." He waited while she saved the files. "Do you think you might open the hangar door again?"

"Why?"

"Planetbound, I have come to appreciate atmospherics."

"Is Earth that different?" She hit the hangar bay door switch.

"It does not have ion storms, like some planets I have been. One had water upflow. Like your rain, but from the ground to the atmosphere."

"What was that like?"  
"The air was heavy with salts. Very corrosive."

"This place must seem pretty boring to you. All we have is like hurricanes and blizzards."

"They are not dangerous to fly through like a magma storm, but they are not nothing." He tilted his head to the open door. Late afternoon sunlight, heavy and gold, slanted through the door. "We face west," he said.

"I guess so. F1 faces east."

"Do all of the hangars face the same directions?"

"Kind of. The ones that face the main tarmac are labeled with 'one'."

"So we?"

"Threes are supposed to be receiving ends. We face away."

"And we are fifth? How many hangars are there?"

"Fifth out of five. Bottom of the pile. It's all very military and orderly and all that."

"You do not have the chance to work your way up in the hierarchy?"

"No, that's already set. It's all stuff you wear on your collar around here. Max and I, obviously, don't even rate. You saw that."

"Jennifer human, I do not have the right words for what I would like to say."

"This sounds serious. Let's hear what you have and we'll fix it." She winked at him. "Might be nice if I actually got to be the teacher around here for once."

"I wish to express…appreciation? For what you and the Max human have done."

"I wouldn't be so quick: Max is just looking out for his own career. Me, well, I can't say I'm doing much different, actually."

"It is more than that. You have not let others taint your mind against me. I think," he paused, "I think that you trust me."

"Isn't that the point of that crazy story you told me?"

"I have not lied to you."

"No, I don't think you have."

"I want you to know that. To remember that. And I shall always remember that you were…," another pause, groping for words, "less unpleasant to me than circumstances dictated."

"Uh, sure."

"There is a better way to say this thing. Yes?"

"Normally we just say 'thank you,'" she said.

"Ah. That is less difficult and more efficient." Two pole stars of his world.

"Starscream, what do you think they'll do to you? When they find out about the leg?"

"You should not worry yourself with that. Of more concern is what they will do to you and the Max human."

Day Five

0320H

Hangar F3

The hangar bay door dented with a thundering sound. Another loud hit, and it caved inwards, entirely ripped from its track. The night was thick black outside. Jennifer, jerked awake on her cot, could see nothing more than dark shapes against more darkness. What was happening?

"Starscream," she said, yanking on shoes, "Are you all right? What's going on?" She ran towards him, but her way was blocked by a towering shape. The red eyes were unfamiliar to her. She saw a targeting laser's red light blossom on her chest. He buzzed something in Cybertronian too fast for her to catch. She froze. Starscream blurted something back. The shape over her looked away, and then back, as if puzzled. But it did not move to attack her.

Beyond him, she could see many small lights swinging crazily, approaching the robot. Had the NEST team come in the middle of the night to take him away? No, the lights were clustered together at different heights and as she looked more carefully she could see they swung on joints from two small figures, barely taller than she was. They crawled all over Starscream like bugs, and the metal plates Ratchet had inserted to prevent him from transforming started clattering to the floor.

Starscream called to the other bot, who left her without a backward glance, and pulling out some whirring blade, sliced cleanly through the suspension harness's chains. Starscream surged to his feet, the smaller bots still clinging to him. One scrambled around to attack the governors on his back jets. Starscream moved a little awkwardly, his foot still not fully functional, giving him a heavy one-sided shuffle. The other large bot squeezed his knuckles around the door's interior track.

Jennifer had never seen him standing upright. Sitting he was only ten or so feet taller than her, shorter than Ratchet or Ironhide standing. On his feet he seemed enormous. His head seemed a mile away from her. He squatted down suddenly, faster than anything that big should have been able to move. He signalled to the other bot, who was a bit shorter, but bulkier through the legs. "Quickly," he said, "before they manage a resistance." She could hear feet pounding along the inner hangar corridor and cursing, but the new robot had dented the door's tracks, trapping the door closed. They could yank on it all they wanted.

He pushed her to the floor. "When they assaulted," he said, "these fell on you. That is the story as you will tell it." He reached for two of the supply crates and placed them over her legs, pinning her down.

"I don't understand…?"

"I am leaving, Jennifer human. I have to. It is my mission." One of the governors dropped from his back with a thunderous crash. The small bot nearly fell with it, its lights swinging crazily as it grabbed for a handhold. The second bot worked around to attack the remaining governor.

He pushed back up, paused, and then crouched down again. Behind him, the other bot yelled something. Jennifer heard the rattle of small arms fire. It echoed in the hangar—she couldn't tell where it was coming from. Was it from outside or was it the new robot? She shrunk down flatter to the floor.

"They must have no doubt," he said, as if to himself. To her, "I regret the necessity, Jennifer human. But they must have no doubt that you were uninvolved." Something flitted across his face that she couldn't read. He flexed his injured hand, and then struck, driving the one remaining upright barb through her left shoulder. She felt it burn through her skin, skitter on bone, and then give again as it cut into the floor. She was not a warrior trained to withstand pain. She screamed so loudly that her throat felt like it would catch on fire. The robot twisted his hand sharply, and the talon snapped off, in her shoulder pinning her to the ground.

"Do not lose that," he said. Or something, she couldn't make sense of it or anything anymore. The room flashed white where the NEST team tried to blow the door with explosives. The second governor fell from his shoulder at that same moment, seeming to shake the floor. It was like the world was coming apart. The other robot began firing at the doorway, backing away, making an obvious retreat to the open hangar door.

"I shall not forget you, Jennifer Silver." The fact that he used her full name startled tears into her eyes. "I ask that you do not forget me. And that you understand that I have done what I must." He waited for her to reply, but all that she could do at the moment was cry. With a last look over his shoulder, he raced to the door, and with a roar of engines, launched into the night air.

Epilogue

Somewhere over the Atlantic

**0455H**

"We received your warning in time, Starscream," Blackout said. The gangly repairbots were dangling between the two airborne bots, running a fuel hose into the jet robot's intake. "The mission was called off. They will be attacking an empty forward base, which we took the liberty of liberally trapping. That should keep them entertained for a while. Soundwave admits he was unable to track their intelligence. He is…frustrated."

"He did not seem to exert himself to find me."

"He was distracted. We were pleased to receive your distress beacon, though we were not actively scanning such a low frequency."

"I had to make use of the materials at hand. The cell phone device was the best I could do in the circumstances."

"And do you have any other intelligence to debrief, or should we send you straight to repair bay?"

"I will need treatment for a mild case of metal shock, and my hand requires attention. But they can wait. I believe I may have discovered some useful information about the indigenous energon source."

"And how did you receive this information, exactly? We have fallen for their misinformation campaigns before."

"Conversations, taped by the human who was with me, before I arrived. Unlikely that they would have planted misinformation that far ahead, unless their Prime is now prescient."

"And this human just handed them over to you?"  
"She had no idea what was on them."

"That was the human in the room with you? I would be insulted to have been left to such a pitiful guard."

"She was not a guard," Starscream said. "She was as much a prisoner as I was."


End file.
